July 5, 2020 – Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (2017) Bloomsbury Publishing
Lincoln in the Bardo is the first novel by the acclaimed short story writer George Saunders. It won the Mann Booker Prize — I almost always love the novels that win the Mann Booker Prize. It is a great novel for our times — funny, quick to read, and uplifting. I liked Lincoln in the Bardo a lot.
The novel is the story of the days after the death of Willie Lincoln, President Lincoln’s son, who died during his presidency. Willie is in the Bardo, a transitionary state of being between death and what comes after death, much like the Christian idea of Limbo. The novel reads almost like a film script or play. It is a series of quotes from Willie and the other spirits in the Bardo alternating with a series of quotes from real and imagined historians and diarists telling what was happening in the physical world at this time. Apart from these quotes, there are no descriptions or stage directions. It takes a few pages to get used to this device and to learn who is speaking (the speaker is identified at the end of each quote, so when reading the longer quotes, you have to look ahead to understand who is speaking). Once you are used to it, the reading is quick and pleasurable.
I found Saunder’s vision of the afterlife to be comforting, though he offers only glimpses of what lies beyond the Bardo. The spirits that are trapped in The Bardo are unable to move on because of their attachment — or you could say obsession — with their past lives. These spirits fixate on the wrongs that were done to them, their desires that were never met, and the possessions, accomplishments, or people they are unable to leave behind. These attachments prevent them from transitioning to the world beyond.
The clearest glimpse of one afterlife we see is a particular hell: spirits that are trapped in vine-link tendrils that can swallow up spirits, particularly the spirits of children, that stay in the Bardo too long. These vines form a hard “carapace” or shell that encases these spirits. These vines and carapaces are made up of spirits that committed wrongs while they were alive; they killed their lovers or babies, or they molested children, or they massacred an entire regiment of an opposing army. But it becomes clear that is not the destructive action alone that dooms these spirits to hell, but the failure to take responsibility for these actions and feel genuine remorse. As one spirit from the carapace says:
We were as we were! How could we have been otherwise? Or, being that way, have done otherwise? We were that way, at that time, and had been led to that place, not by any innate evil in ourselves, but by the state of our cognition and our experience up until that moment.”
A key dialogue starts with a spirit trapped in the Carapace who speaks in a bass voice with a list talking with other spirits who are not trapped in the Carapace. This spirit explains that he killed his baby because it would
remove the negative influence that was that baby (by dropping him into Furniss Creek), would free us up; to be more loving, and be more fully in the world, and would relieve him of the suffering entailed in being forevermore not quite right; would, that is, free him up from his suffering as well, and maximize the total happiness. It seemed that way to you, the Brit said. It did, it truly did, the bass lisper said. Does it seem that way to you now? the woman asked. Less so, the bass lisper said sadly. Then your punishment is having the desired effect, the woman said.
I was moved by the portrayal of Abraham Lincoln in the novel. Lincoln’s greatness comes not from his clear moral vision or his ideaological certainty — he after all was a late supporter of the abolition of slavery who looked for a compromise position. His greatness comes from his empathy, his willingness to listen to the experience of others and to change his views because of what he heard and learned. This approach is the opposite of today’s widespread attitude that dismisses anyone who holds a different view as racist (if you are on the Left) or “Marxists, anarchists, agitators, looters” (if you are on the right). It is worth a long quote from the novel to show how the sadness Lincoln experiences at the death of his son opens him up to understand the sadness of those enslaved. To set the scene: a number of spirits — some from whites and many from African Americans who had suffered the brutality of slavery — entered the body of President Lincoln who was visiting his son’s grave. Lincoln was not consciously aware of the presence of these spirits, and they all left or fell out of Lincoln’s body, except for one spirit of a former slave who stayed with Lincoln as he left the cemetery. This is that spirit talking.
And suddenly, I wanted him to know me. My life. To know us. Our lot. I don’t know why I felt that way but I did. He had no aversion to me, is how I might put it. Or rather, he had once had such an aversion, still bore traces of it, but, in examining that aversion, pushing it into the light, had somewhat, already, eroded it. He was an open book. An opening book. That had just been opened up somewhat wider. By sorrow. And—by us. By all of us, black and white, who had so recently mass-inhabited him. He had not, it seemed, gone unaffected by that event. Not at all. It had made him sad. Sadder. We had. All of us, white and black, had made him sadder, with our sadness. And now, though it sounds strange to say, he was making me sadder with his sadness, and I thought, Well, sir, if we are going to make a sadness party of it, I have some sadness about which I think someone as powerful as you might like to know. And I thought, then, as hard as I could, of Mrs. Hodge, and Elson, and Litzie, and of all I had heard during our long occupancy in that pit regarding their many troubles and degradations, and called to mind, as well, several others of our race I had known and loved (my Mother; my wife; our children, Paul, Timothy, Gloria; Rance P., his sister Bee; the four little Cushmans), and all the things that they had endured, thinking, Sir, if you are as powerful as I feel that you are, and as inclined toward us as you seem to be, endeavor to do something for us, so that we might do something for ourselves. We are ready, sir; are angry, are capable, our hopes are coiled up so tight as to be deadly, or holy: turn us loose, sir, let us at it, let us show what we can do.
May the sadness we experience open us up somewhat wider.