By Deborah Emin
In an America where love stories and the search for love are the basis of most plays, movies, and books that people enjoy, and adventure stories driven by a love interest are the second most popular, the political novelist does not enjoy quite the same worship. Indeed, when I think back to novelists like Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser, or a playwright like Arthur Miller, I can’t help wondering if there are any political writers left among us.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., was the first truly political writer I discovered. George Saunders is another whose work I suggest we pay close attention to today. Far younger than Vonnegut, Saunders has written mostly short fiction as opposed to the full-blown novels of Vonnegut.
Neither of these writers started out as writers. Vonnegut first studied chemistry and then anthropology. Saunders was a geophysicist who explored for oil. Both these men are from the Midwest – Vonnegut from Indiana, Saunders from the South Side of Chicago. I don’t know if their science backgrounds afforded them an edge when it came to describing how we live and the consequences of our collective actions, but I do think it may have helped. I also think that Vonnegut’s early-life experiences as an advertising copywriter helped him to hone the language, while Saunders may be the beneficiary of a new use of adspeak in his narratives.
Another gift that both Vonnegut and Saunders possess is the ability to embed themselves in contemporary life, and especially into the fears of the American male. Not by describing their life sitting at or behind bars, though Vonnegut did do that too, but through their awareness of the ways in which a consumer society has effectively co-opted the souls of human beings, and perverted them. It is striking how both Vonnegut and Saunders have this uncanny knack for writing about male losers. By making them not only humorous but also frightening, their dilemmas are eviscerated. In Vonnegut’s stories, the resolutions are baffling, ludicrous. They beg credulity. With Saunders, we are drawn deeper into the ways in which language has destroyed his characters.
I think Vonnegut’s use of the manipulative language of the ad man may have been the reason so many people have dismissed him as being too fast and loose with story ideas and not deep enough on the emotional level.
Even during my undergraduate years in the late 1960s, Vonnegut’s work stood out from my other hero/writers. It was common then to identify with Salinger’s Holden Caufield, or members of the Glass family. But I was drawn to the end-of-the-world fantasies that Vonnegut served up; his pessimism and anger matched the times. He was funny but he was also, as I believed everyone knew in their heart of hearts, dead right about, for example, the awfulness of the automobile (as in his novel, Breakfast of Champions) and the horrors of war (see Slaughterhouse Five which in part describes his time in Dresden as a POW during the fire-bombing of that city). Those two novels alone were enough to convince me that here was a man who had seen it all and knew, as no other adult seemed to, that we were headed for a collision with our own egos as we groped about in the most narcissistic ways.
To re-read Vonnegut now is, I think, to understand just how prescient he was. His perception as early as 1973 – when Breakfast of Champions was first published – that the automobile had been a very bad idea and would eventually lead us to ruin, was embedded throughout a hilarious novel that took place at an arts festival. Vonnegut humorously foretold how the automobile and its reliance on fossil fuels would kill the planet. While he was making these predictions that no one took seriously, he was also pioneering the use of recurring characters within a larger body of work, along with graphic design elements to illustrate his stories, which gave the whole book an R. Crumb look. He was not writing humor per se, but rather about the sort of corruption that often evolves out of hubris. Vonnegut understood that this type of corruption was a species-wide affliction, that we were all doomed to live on a dying planet whose destruction we had all participated in.
In the early pages of Breakfast of Champions (a wonderful play on the advertising of cereal, right?) he describes a dying planet called Lingo-Three “whose inhabitants resembled American automobiles.” This planet is visited by space travelers – tiny little beings who are asked to take an automobile baby home with them because the creatures are dying out – “they had destroyed their planet’s resources, including its atmosphere.”
These little space travelers were too small to take an actual car with them, but they kept the ideas of the automobile alive, and when they arrived on Earth, they told “the Earthlings about the automobiles. [They] did not know that human beings could be as easily felled by a single idea as by cholera or the bubonic plague. There was no immunity to cuckoo ideas on Earth.”
He then lets his character Kilgore Trout go on about how humans don’t reject ideas because basically we don’t think; we are only interested in knowing the difference between our friends and our enemies. Those who agree with our ideas are our friends; those who disagree become our enemies. What is so striking is that this type of insight keeps resurfacing throughout the novel, as well as in his other novels, describing what I think may be a certain truth about how we Americans deal with the world geopolitically. In language that is simple, clear, and brazen, Vonnegut was able to summarize an entire nation’s attitude about the larger world. He also pumped out novel after novel in which linguistic simplifications of complex observations were, I suspect, given too little credit and urgency.
Perhaps, finally, Vonnegut tired of saying within the space of a novel what he now says in his political pieces, which are available on the Website In These Times. He has retired from the profession of novelist.
But I do think that George Saunders might be the heir to Vonnegut’s world of the unlucky and lonely American male trapped within the prison of the language of our consumer society. In his two previous collections of short stories, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Pastoralia Saunders identified and characterized (if not caricatured) the ways in which the language we learn from popular culture shapes our views of the world.
Now in his more recent work it is clearer how that internalized language masks the horror and violence of this way of thinking, making it seem so sane, rational, even just. As an example, I’ll use the prize-winning story “The Red Bow,” from his new collection, In Persuasion Nation.
In this story the narrator tells us in circumspect language about his daughter, who has been killed by a dog; all that remains is her red ribbon. His wife has retreated to her bedroom out of grief. His unemployed uncle, who lives with him and had no relationship with the girl, becomes galvanized by the death to make sure it never happens again. In fact, their entire village becomes galvanized to the point of killing all the dogs and cats in the place. At one moment in the story, describing the leaflet the uncle has prepared to announce a meeting of all the villagers, the narrator reports: “…it said something along the lines of, you know, why do we live in the world but to love what is ours, and when one of us has cruelly lost what we loved, it is time to band together to stand up to that which threatens that which we love, so that no one else ever has to experience this outrage again.” He continues on in this vein for several more lines, but the point is made. Looking at the supercilious use of the language to express sentiments that are both familiar and naively mistaken, it is clear how Saunders, like Vonnegut, manipulates the adspeak that plagues us when we try to deal in rational terms with the irrational. This kind of manipulative language can be extended to the kinds of nationalistic jingoism that is used to excite people to act in ways that seem sincere but which ultimately push people to adopt equally violent behavior even as they say they abhor it.
Were the situations Saunders describes not so horrific, it would be impossible to give them this weight. It is because the characters are suffering over the loss of a child killed by a rabid dog that we feel compelled to empathize and identify with them.
As in Vonnegut’s novel Breakfast of Champions, we are in the presence of a writer who is determined to make us own up to the words we use and the ideas that are either bitterly empty or useless to us.
It is not because we are incapable of understanding that the automobile culture on which we were raised can be proved bad for us. No, Vonnegut has said, we won’t give it up, because we are indiscriminate about our belief in ideas. And ideas are so dangerous they have the potential to kill us. Then along comes Saunders with a similar world-view, who sees us becoming invaded not just with bad ideas but with the language that conveys them. Thus we may be forever doomed to live within the imprisonment of these words. What a joke, we might conclude: If only pain could be erased with a set of rules, or the killing of all the dogs and cats, birds and fish.
It is through language that governments manipulate their citizens. By exposing the ways in which we have internalized the language of the marketing people who sell us breakfast cereals and political candidates, both Vonnegut and Saunders have made an important contribution to our understanding of the world in which we live. If only we could pay attention to the words they use, and how they use them.
