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Chapter 1

Empathy and Satire:

The Fiction of George Saunders

“The Moral Acculturation of Empathy”: Saunders and Satire

George Saunders follows the sensibility of American “dark” satire, which perhaps stems in part from the American tradition of free speech as upheld in Hustler Magazine v. Falwell (1988).³ American dark satire, especially contemporary American dark satire, is rarely if ever strictly Horatian, Juvenalian, or Menippean; it is satire as a mode rather than a genre. Many critics are quick to indicate the satire at play in Saunders’s stories. However, few have analyzed in quite the manner Layne Neeper has.

In “‘To Soften the Heart’: George Saunders, Postmodern Satire, and Empathy” (2016), Neeper analyzes how Saunders’s satire, as a reimagining of the satiric formula, prods us toward empathy. By staying

with his post-modernist proclivities, Saunders burlesques the quotidian horrors and degradations visited upon characters in a nearly parallel universe to our own contemporary American life, but without even the faintest possibility of prescriptive remedies, instead supplanting the logos of traditional satire, the reasonableness of implied correction, with the pathos of empathetic recognition, an absurd alternative, but the only alternative, given the grotesqueries of Saunders’s fictional worlds and hapless characters that inhabit them. That his work may still be categorized as satirical resides in the fact that the fiction is transactional—readers should feel moved to change, to overcome something—but the sole upshot of Saunders’s satire is to lead to the moral acculturation of empathy in readers, so that we are put in “the proper relation to the truth,” rather than to the inducement to the righting of personal faults or social ills, the avowed aim of the conventional satirist. (Neeper 286-287, italics original)

This transactional quality has been mentioned by Saunders in interviews. For him, empathy comes from a pact between himself and the reader.

One way to reach this empathetic connection is through satire. According to Brian A. Connery and Kirk Combe in their introduction to Theorizing Satire (1995), reading satire is more perilous than “general” reading. They assert that the danger occurs because “satirists specialize in demolition projects. The one thing we know about satire is that it promises to tell us what we do not want to know—what we may, in fact, resist knowing. One is apt to find one’s former consciousness uninhabitable when the work of the satirist is done” (Connery and Combe 1). Connery and Combe may go a bit far to claim that satirists specialize in “demolition projects,” especially because Saunders’s writing is subtler. He does not “tell us” what we do not care to know but insinuates it. His writing, however, does leave the “consciousness,” if not altogether uninhabitable, at least altered. Unlike many satirists, his aim is to attune us to compassion.

Saunders follows the satiric mode found in Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, and Donald Barthelme and unsurprisingly has written essays concerning all three, which are included in his collection of essays, The Braindead Megaphone (2007). In “The United States of Huck,”⁴ originally published as the introduction for a Modern Library paperback edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Saunders dubs Twain “the funniest literary American writer,” describing his humor as “energetic and true and pure” (189). Huck Finn, as Saunders refers to the novel, addresses politics not by being politically incorrect for the sake of a joke but by showing us the political—and personal—stakes of language made taboo in Twain’s life (most notably through Huck’s quandary over the “nigger,” Jim, and whether to turn him in). Saunders’s assessment is that Twain’s “book was making [Twain] uncomfortable. His comic novel was doing things a comic novel was not supposed to do” because “his subconscious was urging him do things his conscious mind didn’t know could be done, or didn’t particularly want done” (USH 191). Saunders’s writing uses idiosyncratic language in a manner akin to how Twain uses language in Huck Finn: it divulges what is at stake in contemporary American sociopolitical culture. Saunders develops a theory, which he facetiously calls, in typical Saundersian fashion, a “Tentative Narrative Theory” of Twain’s “Apparent Narrative Rationales.” His theory is that Twain’s “tension between various warring parts of Sam Clemens—the radical and the reactionary; the savage satirist and the kindly Humorist; the raw hick and the aspiring genteel Literary Figure—is what makes Huck Finn such a rich and formidable book” (USH 191-192).

Those readers who approach Saunders by considering his similarities with Twain may find Saunders to be an author of similar tension. He is satirical yet kindly, a “blue collar” literary academic, but he seems more aware of these qualities in his writing; his literature entertains not despite its ethical awareness but because of it, even if the goal of writing is not “to be” ethical. Saunders contends that the ethical dilemma at the heart of the book—should Huck turn in Jim or not?—was not always clear to Twain, who

only dimly and imperfectly understood that his book had a Central Moral Vector. Or rather, he knew, but sometimes forgot. Or rather, he knew, but periodically got interested in other aspects of the book and lost sight of it. Or maybe, and most interestingly: his Central Moral Vector was too hot to handle, and would have required him to simultaneously invent, understand, and complete his book in an entirely new genre, a genre that neither Twain nor the world was quite ready for. (USH 197-198)

In Saunders’s fiction, the central ethical dilemmas are generally more clearly pronounced, more in focus than they are in Huck Finn, yet Saunders’s fiction is heir to this style of dark yet compassionate satire, more so than, for example, the satire found in “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”

In “Mr. Vonnegut in Sumatra,”⁵ an astute essay on Slaughterhouse-Five, or the Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death (1969), Saunders describes humor as “what happens when we’re told the truth quicker and more directly than we’re used to. The comic is the truth stripped of the habitual, the cushioning, the easy consolation” (80). In a sense, Saunders is reminding us of what has become a cliché regarding humor: it is funny because it is true. However, if we believe we laugh despite how we feel, this is not the truth. When we truly understand how we respond to that which unsettles us, we realize that when we laugh at satire we laugh because of how we feel; we laugh to release the tension. Dark satire is that which forces us to confront an unfiltered taboo that is otherwise too painful to consider, whether it be racism or death. We are tricked, in a sense, into confronting this painful issue. This is the reason why Vonnegut is, as Saunders states bluntly, a “funny” writer (MVS 77).

Saunders’s reading of Slaughterhouse-Five leads him to eventually realize that its seemingly absurdist elements are necessary, since “our most profound experiences may require this artistic uncoupling from the actual” (79, italics original). Becoming “unstuck” in time and being held captive by aliens become necessary events for leaving the reader altered by the experience of reading Slaughterhouse-Five. Regarding the novel, Saunders argues that Vonnegut “wrote as if there were a continuum of consciousness between himself and the Terrible Event” because he never claimed that it had excused him from the expected “obligations of being kind, attempting to understand, behaving decently. On the contrary, Vonnegut seemed to feel that unkindness […] had been the cause of his Terrible Event, and that what he had learned from this experience was […] the importance of preserving kindness in ourselves at all costs” (77). The Terrible Event was Vonnegut’s experience during World War II, when, as a captive of the Nazis, he survived the Allied bombing of Dresden by hiding inside the meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was imprisoned. The experience seems to shape the ethics of the novel, which Saunders notes, perhaps because they resonate with his own ethical concerns. When Saunders first read Slaughterhouse-Five, he was struck by the absence of detail, the lack of realism. Only later did he realize that the goal of Vonnegut’s novel was “to soften the heart, to encourage our capacity for pity and sorrow” (79). This is also what Saunders’s writing essentially does. Both the satire and the absurd encourage our capacity for kindness and compassion.

In the essay “The Perfect Gerbil: Reading Barthelme’s ‘The School’,” Saunders describes the rising action of Barthelme’s story, in which the postmodern writer breaks an established pattern—everything that comes into the school dies—while continuing to escalate the plot. According to Saunders, Barthelme “has gotten tired of being polite” so that “[w]ithout worrying about whether it’s allowed, whether it will be understood, or is logical within the world of the story […] he races off in the direction his logic is taking him […] trying to get the story to answer the questions the thing’s been asking all along; What are we to make of death? How are we to live in a world where death is king?” (182). This break in the pattern allows Barthelme to deal with an otherwise sensitive subject.

Barthelme is aware of the game: for the sake of the plot, the action must rise. This is achieved by establishing a pattern, yet this pattern cannot go on indefinitely; once the reader catches on, to insist on continuing the pattern makes the reader feel insulted. Barthelme uses humor in a way that makes it seem as if the story is winking and nudging its reader. The pattern of death is funny, yet the story’s humor is in the service of something else, namely, forcing us to confront death. Eventually the narrator tells us of deaths outside the school, but the point at which the story really takes a twist is when the students begin asking where all the dead have gone. Suddenly, the story is not just about a bunch of dead plants and animals but about the meaning of life. Then the students ask if the narrator will make love with Helen, a character who until this point in the story has gone unmentioned. A story about death becomes also a love story. Of course, when the narrator and Helen begin to be intimate there is a knock at the door—like a knock-knock joke—and a gerbil enters the room. Since we know the pattern, we can assume the gerbil will not live a long life. The absurdist moment here helps us to confront life, love, and death in a final single paragraph. This is not postmodern irony for irony’s sake but an emotionally charged moment that challenges us, ethically, to consider what is important to us in life. Life feels as brief as Barthelme’s story demonstrates, and love may be all we have time to share. Like Barthelme’s story, Saunders’s writing is compassionate because of its dark humor; the absurd elements in his—and Barthelme’s, Vonnegut’s, and Twain’s—stories are not so absurd when considered as necessary elements to affect an emotional response from the reader. Yet, while Saunders may be the most prominent living author writing this type of emotionally-charged ethical satire, he is not the only one.

“America 101”: Peers, Influences, and David Foster Wallace

As easily as Saunders can be compared to his forebears, he also can be compared to certain contemporary American or America-based authors who have achieved prominence on account of their “sincere” writing, achieved either through satire or experimentation with form. Saunders’s writing embodies both. Like Jonathan Franzen and Gary Shteyngart, he is a satirist. Like Jennifer Egan and Junot Díaz, he experiments with form. What sets his work apart is that he creates worlds more than borrows from them. His fiction may reference pop culture, but just as often he creates his own cultures. By distancing his stories from a fully recognizable world through the use of his idiolect, Saunders helps the reader become deeply aware of the sociocultural and linguistic idiosyncrasies of contemporary American culture. Richard Lee describes these worlds as “close enough in their zeitgeist to our own—the occasional dystopic setting or futuristic context notwithstanding that reviewers’ comments since his first collection routinely acknowledge” Saunders as a satirist (2010, 83). He is a “consciously ironic voice who plays with notions of the real and the fictive, a writer who easily ironies the writing situation at both macro- and micro-levels: cultural critique at the large scale, consciousness and perception at the narrative scale” (2010, 83). The worldbuilding found in Saunders’s writing occasionally takes its cues from genre fiction, especially speculative fiction, in a way reminiscent of Jonathan Lethem’s early novels or of Michael Chabon’s later writing, yet Saunders also often draws from lived experience. In the second part of an interview with Patrick Dacey published in BOMB, Saunders describes his life while reading Hemingway, an author he admired but found impossible to emulate:

Living in Amarillo, Texas, working as a groundsman at an apartment complex, with strippers for pals […], goofball drunks recently laid off from the nuclear plant accosting me at night when I played in our comical country band, a certain quality of West Texas lunatic-speak I was hearing, full of way off-base dreams and aspirations—I just couldn’t hear that American in Hem-speak. (2017, n.p.)

Saunders’s jobs have informed his writing. After graduating from the Colorado School of Mines and working as a geophysicist, he also worked as a doorman, roofer, convenience store clerk, slaughterhouse knuckle puller, and pharmaceutical company report writer.⁶ In an interview with Jana Hoops, Saunders describes his work experience as forming a chapter of his life during which he studied “America 101” and discovered “what our country—and capitalism—are really like, face-to-face” (Dacey n.p.).

Saunders is a constant reader and has been inspired by many writers, especially short fiction authors. He admires the Russian masters of short stories and novellas: Isaac Babel, Anton Chekhov, and Leo Tolstoy. American authors have influenced his writing directly as well. Tobias Wolff, regarded for his short fiction, was his teacher at the MFA program in Creative Writing at Syracuse. Saunders’s satire, as I have mentioned, is in the vein of Twain and Vonnegut. However, his style and tone belong to the present. Among North American authors, for example, his style bears similarities to that found especially in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian trilogy: Oryx & Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013).⁷ Among contemporary American authors, he is praised by Tobias Wolff, Thomas Pynchon, Jay McInerney, and Colson Whitehead. Preeminent among those who have praised him, however, and the writer whose mission is closest to the heart of Saunders’s writing, is the late David Foster Wallace.⁸ In an article for The New York Times Magazine, Joel Lovell reminisces about his years at Harper’s Magazine, recalling that around the time of the book launch for the novel Infinite Jest (1996), Wallace was “standing in the hall in his untied high-tops, saying that George Saunders was the most exciting writer in America” (2013, n.p.). This comment came from the author who would, upon publishing Infinite Jest, become the most exciting writer in America.

In his well-received essay, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,”⁹ originally published in 1993 in The Review of Contemporary Fiction and collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997), Wallace writes that “irony, poker-faced silence, and fear of ridicule are distinctive features of contemporary U.S. culture (of which cutting-edge fiction is a part) that enjoy any significant relation to the television whose weird pretty hand has my generation by the throat” (171). He also contends that his intention is “to argue that irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and that at the same time they are agents of great despair and stasis in U.S. culture, and that for aspiring fictionists they pose terrifically vexing problems” (EUP 171). Saunders’s Civilwarland in Bad Decline, a collection of stories and a novella published a few years after this essay appeared, introduced a writer whose fiction looked both backward and forward at once, while somehow still connecting with the present culture that Wallace describes. Over the next two decades, and increasingly after 9/11, television culture would give way to Internet culture, one in which the American president could win an election by openly attacking Muslims, Mexicans, women—anyone considered the Other—and by being a parody and caricature of himself, meanwhile complaining about the ridicule he receives via Internet media.

Wallace offers two main premises in “E Unibus Pluram,” the first point being that “a certain subgenre of pop-conscious postmodern fiction, written mostly by young Americans, has lately arisen and made a real attempt to transfigure a world of and for appearance, mass appeal, and television,” which seems positive, except that, as his second point indicates, “televisual culture has evolved to a point where it seems invulnerable to any such transfiguring assault” (171). The same can be said of our current technoculture, although, unlike television, it offers us new ways to read. Saunders’s Fox 8 originally was available only as a Kindle Single. While he still publishes print books, Saunders’s work, like that of most contemporary authors, is also readily available in electronic formats: Kindle Editions, online archives, audiobooks—forms which were unavailable or less readily available to David Foster Wallace.

We need not think strictly in terms of the influence of technoculture, however. If contemporary American culture is to be saddled with any modifier, it is more a culture of immediacy. Saunders is regarded for his short stories and novellas; his first novel only appeared after four collections of short fiction. While the American short story has become a praised form, despite the hesitation of publishers to print or promote it, Saunders, without slighting the caliber of his work, may benefit from living in a culture that demands immediacy. His first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), is ambitious but makes fewer demands on the reader’s time and attention span than novels on the grand scale of Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1993), Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). Although Saunders has stated that he was compelled to write the novel, he has always thought of himself as a short fiction author. Even his essays often tend to read more like short stories than essay. Saunders’s shortest text fits on a paper bag—thanks to its publisher, Chipotle. Is this selling out? Is it irony? Unquestionably, it is at least a way to engage more unlikely readers.

The writing of both Wallace and Saunders is as much informed by American culture as it is a response and challenge to it. Likewise, it is a response to the postmodern and, for Saunders (albeit not intentionally or consciously), to the posthuman. Wallace explains, in an oft-quoted response from a 1993 interview with Larry McCaffery, collected in Conversations with David Foster Wallace (2012), that “[i]rony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for,” and “what made the early postmodernists great artists” (48). The advantage of using irony, he notes, “is that it splits things apart, gets above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates” (McCaffery 48). For Wallace, however, there is a point when irony no longer fulfills its purpose. The complication, he believes, “is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, “then” what do we do? Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone” (McCaffery 48).

Postmodern irony becomes the goal to the exclusion of sentimentality or ethicality, a criticism that Wallace himself levies, justly or not, on the fiction of Brett Easton Ellis. Wallace, disturbed by the trend, contends that “[p]ostmodern irony and cynicism become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naïve to all the weary ironists” (McCaffery 48). Instead of liberating literature, a superfluous or unchecked use of irony and cynicism encage it. However, Wallace is not the only author who remedied the emotionless, unethical fiction that he attacked.

“Radical Kindness”: A Posthuman Literature of Compassion

Wallace was a key member of a new generation of writers whose writing is described as sincere and ethical while still using irony. In an important essay, “The New Sincerity” (2016), Adam Kelly claims that George Saunders’s writing is part of this broader artistic cultural trend known as the New Sincerity. Kelly describes the art associated with this trend as generally being “regarded as a sturdy affirmation of nonironic values” and demonstrating “a renewed taking of responsibility for the meaning of ones’ words,” as well as offering “a post-postmodern embrace of the ‘single-entendre’ principles invoked by Wallace” in “E Unibus Pluram” (198). He also suggests that the New Sincerity aesthetic is one shared by many of Wallace’s and Saunders’s peers, including Michael Chabon, Junot Díaz, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, Dana Spiotta, and Colson Whitehead.

For such New Sincerity writers, Kelly argues that “the guarantee of the writer’s sincerity cannot finally lie in representation” (TNS 205). In what reads as a rather Derridean description, this means that “[w]hat happens off the page, outside representation depends upon the invocation and response of another; this other to whom I respond, and whose response I await, is for many New Sincerity writers, the actual reader of their text” (TNS 205). Sincerity is contingent upon the reader. Kelly claims that “in New Sincerity writing, the author and reader really do exist, which is to say they are not simply implied” (TNS 206, italics original). Thus, New Sincerity writing must be understood “as a contingent rather than ideal process that recapitulates the struggle for communication differently and anew in each reading” (TNS 206). Saunders’s irony is not irony for the sake of irony but for the sake of response. How we, as readers, respond, how we feel “differently and anew in each reading,” is the mark of New Sincerity writing.

In an interview for Salon, Saunders admits that irony can be a way to honesty. He does not invoke irony to be honest; rather, by being honest, he is also often sarcastic. Like Wallace, he distinguishes between the uses of irony: “I think the irony or the humor that I like is stuff that is exactly what’s needed to drive that wedge into the truth, and the stuff that I don’t like is the superfluous kind of cleverness” (2014, n.p.). Wallace’s worries are alleviated by Saunders, who does not believe that sarcasm and compassion are mutually exclusive. In an interview for The Missouri Review, Saunders explains that sarcasm and compassion are “manifestations of the same impulse,” with compassion being what he calls “plain sight. If you see something plainly, without attachment to your own preconceptions of it and without any aversion to what you see, that's compassion because you're minimizing the distinction between subject and object. Then whatever needs to be done, you can do it quickly and efficiently, to address whatever the suffering” (2001, 56, italics my own).

The sardonic sarcasm of his fiction allows him to “get away with” sentimentalism. Emotion becomes a relief from irony. The characters in his fiction work toward redemption in the more archaic sense of buying back freedom—freedom from the sociocultural constraints that impinge upon their sense of ethicality, their desire for what Saunders has called “radical kindness” (2007, “Medium Matters”), and what I call, borrowing from his commencement speech, “variable kindness.”¹⁰

In the commencement speech, published as Congratulations, by the way: Some Thoughts on Kindness, Saunders describes the same ethical attitude present in his fiction. For him, because “kindness is variable, we might also reasonably conclude that it is improvable” (n.p., italics original).¹¹ Saunders’s sense of ethics is parallel to that proposed by many posthuman writers, including Jacques Derrida, who suggests a hyperethic: ethics beyond ethics. Saunders states a similar idea in a more straightforward manner, describing kindness as an ethics “that expands to include…well, everything” (CBW n.p., ellipsis original). In a 2017 article for The Guardian, he asserts that, in terms of his fiction, he achieves a sense of ethicality by attuning himself to his readers, clarifying that we often believe that

the empathetic function in fiction is accomplished via the writer’s relation to his [or her] characters, but it’s also accomplished via the writer’s relation to his [or her] reader. You make a rarefied place (rarefied in language, in form; perfected in many inarticulable beauties—the way two scenes abut; a certain formal device that self-escalates; the perfect place at which a chapter cuts off); and then welcome the reader in. (WWRD, n.p.)

The point is not to underestimate the reader and to develop a relationship with the reader.

In several interviews, Saunders further explains the relationship between kindness or compassion and his literature. For example, in the aforementioned 2007 The Colbert Report episode, Saunders explains in his first appearance on the show that when prose is “done right” it functions “kind of like empathy training wheels.” Kindness and compassion would become regular points addressed in his three subsequent interviews with Stephen Colbert. Much later, in an interview for the literary website Goodreads, Saunders replies to a query regarding compassion and the subject of his essay for The New Yorker, “Who Are All These Trump Supporters?”. I quote here and in the following paragraph almost the full response because it offers a first-person explanation of Saunders’s ethical awareness:

Depending on how you define compassion, actions are never beyond compassion. Sometimes we misunderstand [compassion] as being this bland, kowtowing niceness: Somebody hits you in the head with a rock and you say, "Thank you so much for the geology lesson." But compassion in Eastern traditions is much more fierce. It's basically calling someone on their bullshit. At the heart of it there's a clarity that would say, If I could press a button and make that person see his own actions, that would be the best. (Goodreads n.p., brackets original,)

By mentioning “Eastern traditions,” Saunders may be alluding to his own Buddhist practice, which resonates with the kind of radical or variable kindness he elsewhere mentions.

Saunders continues by informing us of his own practice that safeguards him from indulging in negative emotions. As he describes it,

I'm just trying to be really watchful in my own heart for any kind of gratuitous negative emotion. I'm [thinking] Jesus was here, Buddha was here, Gandhi was here, Tolstoy was here, Mother Teresa was here, and they all said basically the same thing: Our capacity for understanding the other is greater than we think. It's not easy and we're not very good at it habitually, but we can get better at it and it's always beneficial. It's beneficial to you, and it's beneficial to the other. That's what I say—in real life I'm swearing under my breath on the internet. (Goodreads n.p., brackets original, italics my own)

Here, Saunders references not only historical religious and philosophical figures but Tolstoy, whom we associate primarily with writing but who also later devoted himself to religion. Saunders also claims a premise aligned with posthumanist ethics: “Our capacity for understanding the other is greater than we think.”

This idea is consistent with Derrida’s notion of ethics beyond ethics, which has snaked its way into posthumanist ethics. Saunders does not claim that we can understand the Other, but that we have the capacity to do so. Despite the apparent simplicity of his language, his concept of ethics is careful not to assume that we can wholly understand the Other. Furthermore, critics of postcolonialism insist that we cannot speak wholly for the Other. This does not mean we should not try to understand the Other or, I argue, that we should refuse to try to speak on behalf of the Other but that to do so is difficult, as Saunders duly notes, and, moreover, dangerous. Indeed, thinking we can understand or speak for the Other can turn against us. I will discuss this in greater detail in the following chapter, but we should know that we must be careful never to assume we do know or speak entirely for the Other. Nevertheless, I concur with Saunders’s belief: we have a greater capacity to understand the Other than we generally acknowledge. In short, our power to empathize is greater than we think.

Writing in the 21^st century, both Wallace and Saunders seem to become increasingly more ethically aware; that is, their writing becomes even more emotionally engaged. Wallace’s essay on the Maine Lobster Festival, “Consider the Lobster,”¹² originally published in Gourmet (2004) and later included in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (2005), is a case in point. That his focus is on the pain of a nonhuman being is key. Wallace reports on the suffering of lobsters boiled alive for human gluttony and considers that

the questions of whether and how different kinds of animals feel pain, and of whether and why it might be justifiable to inflict pain on them in order to eat them, turn out to be extremely complex and difficult. And comparative neuroanatomy is only part of the problem. Since pain is a totally subjective mental experience, we do not have direct access to anyone or anything’s pain but our own; and even just the principles by which we can infer that other human beings experience pain and have a legitimate interest in not feeling pain involve hard-core philosophy—metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, ethics. (CL 246)

For Wallace, the greatest consideration “is that the whole animal-cruelty-and-eating issue is not just complex, it’s also uncomfortable” (CL 246). This uncomfortableness presents a range of moral questions, which Wallace leaves open to the reader to consider.

In “David Foster Wallace and the Ethical Challenge of Posthumanism,” Wilson Kaiser claims that “Wallace uses his own writing to foreground an ethical challenge that does not sit easily within the parameters of postmodernism” (2014, 153). Kaiser’s ruminations on Wallace’s fiction and essays may also be applied to Saunders’s writings. Kaiser argues that “Wallace’s literary worlds, for all their commitment to an ethics, do not assume personal autonomy or an irresoluble answerability to an Other” but “rather are “situated in a concrete engagement with a specific milieu that contains a multiplicity of human and non-human actors” (Kaiser 154). According to Kaiser, the ethics found in Wallace’s “literary worlds” are posthuman rather than postmodern. They avoid postulating generalizing claims, focusing instead on “affinities within a network of possibilities” (Kaiser 155); they rarely moralize. The same is true of Saunders’s writing.

Comparable to “Consider the Lobster” and indicative of Kaiser’s claims, Wallace’s opening sentence to the short story “The Depressed Person,” included in the short fiction collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999), begins “[t]he depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror” (37). Here, it is difficult not to equate Wallace’s own struggle with depression with that of the character, but instead of generalizing depression, the protagonist’s depression is particular. By the end of the story, her therapist’s death has left her questioning her capacity for compassion. Wallace does not moralize but instead presents an ethically complex scenario. As I will evince later, Saunders’s writing also functions in this way: it presents ethically complex situations without any decisive moral.

In a different vein, the first chapter of Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) describes the movements and speech of Hal, a tennis prodigy. The administration comments upon his movements and speech:

‘But the sounds he made.’

‘Undescribable.’

‘Like an animal.’

‘Subanimalistic noises and sounds.’

‘Nor let’s not forget the gestures.’

‘Have you ever gotten help for this boy Dr. Tavis?’

‘Like some sort of animal with something in its mouth.’

‘This boy is damaged.’

‘Like a stick of butter being hit with a mallet.’

‘A writhing animal with a knife in its eye.’ (14)

The sounds Hal makes are later compared with those of a drowning goat, his sounds and actions barely mammalian. He is both compared to an animal, in a derogatory sense, and considered less than animal (subanimalistic) before being compared with an object made from the bodily fluids of an animal (butter). The focus is on the sounds and gestures that are Hal’s (attempts at) language. In his essay, Kaiser conjectures that Hal’s transformation “from a superb human specimen, a remarkable athlete and mental prodigy, to something” animalistic is an instance of “becoming-animal,” as proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (57). Hal’s “pain, travels through neural and physiological networks that are no longer human” (Kaiser 57-58). Saunders’s characters generally do not undergo such transformations, but the relationships between human and nonhuman animals appear with greater frequency, even if only in passing. Furthermore, he alludes to them almost exclusively in terms of violence and death. I explore this relationship in some fashion in the chapters to follow.

“An Inherently Ethical Activity”: Reading Saunders Critically

Until recently, the critical analysis of Saunders has been rather thin, with the appearance of only a few academic essays—upon which I will comment later in this chapter—and a series of interviews and book reviews. However, in 2017, the first collection of critical essays on the author finally was published. The scholarly work examines Saunders’s writing from a variety of angles—linguistic, sociopolitical, biopolitical, psychological, and even theological—making George Saunders: Critical Essays a landmark collection in Saunders criticism. The collection includes an essay by Adam Kelly, who—following his earlier essay on New Sincerity—directly addresses Saunders’s fiction in terms of New Sincerity. In “Language Between Lyricism and Corporatism: George Saunders’s New Sincerity,” he notes how Saunders’s “use of first-person narration supports his New Sincerity aesthetic, allowing him to explore the limits of expressive subjectivity, ethical consciousness, and detached spectatorship under neoliberal conditions” (49). Even Saunders’s third-person narration, which I will address in a later chapter, reads like first-person narration.

Most of the information on Saunders is still found in interviews and book reviews. As the first monograph on the author, this book aims to provide a sustained analysis of Saunders’s fiction, primarily exploring posthumanist ethics as they relate to nonhuman and human animal relationships in Saunders’s texts. As this study is interdisciplinary, I believe it will be useful not only for understanding Saunders’s fiction but for understanding different conceptions of posthumanist ethics and how we relate to and with nonhuman animals.

Earlier, I compared David Foster Wallace’s writing with that of Saunders. Likewise, John C. Hawkins’s Liberty University Master’s thesis, Life Inside the Spectacle: David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, and Storytelling in the Age of Entertainment (2013), offers an insightful reading of and commentary on Saunders’s In Persuasion Nation alongside Infinite Jest. He argues that both books “confront the problems of isolation and dehumanization created by entertainment-based consumerism” (Hawkins 4) and especially notes Saunders’s idiosyncratic language and use of first-person and close third-person narrators. Like Hawkins, Laura Morris also compares a contemporary author with Saunders in “Beyond Irony: Reconsidering the Post-Postmodernism of George Saunders and Dave Eggers” (2016). She focuses on how the narratives of both authors demonstrate a “recent literary development” that centers “on new possibilities of sincerity in order to transcend postmodernism’s use of self-reflexive irony” (Morris 117). Her critical stance is, for all purposes, nearly equivalent to that of Adam Kelly’s concept of New Sincerity, except that she draws on the philosophy of Jacques Rancière to make her point. Like Kelly, Hawkins, and Morris, most critics of Saunders examine his writing in terms of recent cultural and social criticisms, often by exploring how language functions in his texts or how ethical situations are presented, yet their approaches are quite varied.

Two studies on class are found in essays by Juliana Nalerio and David P. Rando. Juliana Nalerio’s essay, “The Patriarch’s Balls: Class Consciousness, Violence, and Dystopia in George Saunders’s Vision of Contemporary America,” offers a critical reading of “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” analyzing class anxiety and “the latent violence inherent in America’s post-colonial capitalist system,” as well as the techniques Saunders uses to expose violence (2015, 90). David P. Rando also considers class in his essay “George Saunders and the Postmodern Working Class,” which describes how Saunders’s story “Sea Oak” and his fiction in general challenges readers “to reconsider basic questions of class representation” (2012, 437).

Critics also have commented on Saunders’s fictional worlds. In a politically charged reading, “Changes in Totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt, Franz Fühmann, and George Saunders,” Todd Cesaratto investigates how “the structure and semantics of totalitarian organization have changed” and adapted to “power-sharing” social structures (2011, 74). He compares the totalitarianism found in both the socialist system of Franz Fühmann’s “Der Haufen” and the capitalist, hyperconsumer cultural setting of Saunders’s “My Flamboyant Grandson.” The effects of a hyperconsumer totalitarian technoculture also are examined in Gil Germain’s “‘It’s Not Yours to Do With What You Like!’ A Critical Reading of George Saunders’ Jon” (2014). Germain notes “how Saunders uses language to underscore the general point that there is no strict separation between our inner thoughts and feelings [...] and the world with which we interact” (n.p.). We learn much about the worlds where Saunders’s characters exist, which are like caricatures of our own, based on how the characters speak, think, and interact with their surroundings.

Closely related to the aforementioned studies is Sarah Pogell’s exploration of hyperreality through a Baudrillardian lens in “‘The Verisimilitude Inspector’: George Saunders as the New Baudrillard?” (2011). For her, Jean Baudrillard’s stages of the sign, most significantly the simulacrum, are exemplified in the writing of Saunders, especially in his stories set in theme parks. Notably, she compares Baudrillard’s explication of the stages of the sign to the “seeming impenetrability” of Derrida’s notion of différance (Pogell 461). Another angle of Saunders’s work is examined in Catherine Garnett’s “The Future in the Pasture: Pastoral Precarity in George Saunders’s ‘Interior Gardens’” (2014). Garnett understands Saunders’s writing as “part of a general trend visible across popular culture that considers pastoral as a representational mode newly relevant to our age” (137). Like Pogell, she emphasizes Saunders’s use of theme parks as settings, noting that Saunders’s writing blurs distinctions: “the otium/negotium divide mystifies the interrelatedness of the terms—the operation of work in the appearance of leisure” (Garnett 139). Beyond pastoral, Saunders’s writing blurs distinctions in many ways, as should become evident in later chapters.

The critical response to Saunders’s writing in terms of socioeconomics, postcolonialism, and postmodernism is not arbitrary. Even if Saunders is not consciously choosing to write stories that are postcolonial or postmodern, such readings of his literature are tuning into what is present in his writing, which in turn is tuned into American culture. His settings, characters, language, and subjects are all rooted in this culture. Conspicuously absent, however, are posthuman readings of his fiction. With the number of approaches toward posthumanism currently being developed and practiced, it is surprising that only one critic has examined Saunders’s fiction through this lens.

Christina Bieber Lake has remarked on certain posthuman elements at play in Saunders’s writing. In Prophets of the Posthuman: American Fiction, Biotechnology, and the Ethics of Personhood (2013), Lake includes a chapter on Saunders and speculative fiction author James Tiptree, Jr.¹³ In the preface to the book, she argues that

[a]lthough there has been a recognized “turn toward the ethical” already […] the continued misrecognition of reading as an inherently ethical activity has impoverished public debate on questions that reach beyond the traditional domains of literary study. By isolating fiction between the two poles of reading professionally and reading for entertainment, fiction’s potential contribution to the larger ethical debates is marginalized. (xvi)

Lake’s analysis of posthumanism in Saunders’s fiction is concerned primarily with the ethics of biotechnology in a sense that is more appropriately in line with transhumanism, her analysis consisting solely of a reading of “I CAN SPEAK!™.” However, I do agree with some of her more general points, such as the lack of recognition of fiction as a meaningful contributor to ethical discourse.

For Lake, ethical discourse must include careful consideration of narrative. As she notes, one of her primary goals “is to demonstrate that ethical debates—if they are to be meaningful at all—require deep, nuanced, and ongoing reflection on narrative. Narrative does not visit ethical questions abstractly; it lives them, because it lives in the realm of ethos, of persons as persons engaged with one another” (Lake xvii).

The idea that literature “lives” ethical questions is related to my claim that literature allows us to “experience” what can be presented only conceptually by philosophy. In this sense, literature can be ethical. Lake later claims that “literary artists maintain a hope that someone in their audience will see things the way they see them. These writers want individuals to reconsider how they see themselves, others, and life itself. George Saunders is just such a writer” (Lake xviii-xix). Saunders and many other writers not only want to entertain but to affect us.

In an interview for The White Review, Saunders admits that a primary concern “was (and is) not to make trivial work—work that poses too-easy answers to notcritical questions. We’re here, we’re living, loving, but won’t be for long—so I want my stories to somehow urgently acknowledge all of that” (2016, n.p.). Fiction can prod us toward difficult answers to critical questions and help us to be more compassionate. In The Missouri Review interview previously referenced, Saunders states that “the order of the day is compassion” and “that fiction has a part to play in urging us, as a species, toward compassion” (64, italics my own). Based on his own words, Lake is correct to assume, then, that for Saunders, what makes an interesting story is also one with significant ethical stakes.

Another critical reading that is similarly concerned with affect and empathy is the aforementioned Layne Neeper’s “‘To Soften the Heart:’ George Saunders, Postmodern Satire, and Empathy” (2016). Neeper boldly claims that “George Saunders’s postmodern fiction serves as the exemplar for early twenty-first-century American satire’s new attention to affect—to empathy” (282). The essay situates Saunders’s satire as non-traditional, in terms of its literary function. Neeper claims that Saunders’s writing “may still be categorized as satirical” because

the fiction is transactional—readers should feel moved to change, to overcome something—but the sole upshot of Saunders’s satire is to lead to the moral acculturation of empathy in readers, so that we are put in “the proper relation to the truth,” rather than to the inducement to the righting of personal faults or social ills, the avowed aim of the conventional satirist. (287, italics original)

In other words, Saunders’s satire calls on us to empathize. That we may need to right personal faults or social ills is secondary, or, as Neeper puts it, “[p]athos supersedes correction” (296).

One area of criticism that generally has been avoided by critics is the use of nonhuman animals in his fiction, especially in terms of ethics and posthumanist studies. It is this particular gap I aim to fill with the research and analyses I will present in the following chapters. Before settling in to a study of the fiction, however, it is beneficial to have an understanding of the kind of critical theory from which I will draw. For this reason, Chapter 2 provides a survey of posthumanism and posthumanist theory, as the concepts being developed in this area are those I wish to contemplate as we proceed to analyze Saunders’s literature. While the concepts are often difficult to comprehend due to the careful attention to language and frequent use of neologisms, the way these concepts appear in Saunders’s fiction allows for us to analyze how such theories play out in scenarios while also providing a richer appreciation of how his writing functions. Fiction and theory perform complementary roles, especially, in this case, in regards to developing an awareness of ethics. With this understanding of fiction and theory, we may proceed to a survey of posthumanism.