Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Lincoln in the Bardo is the strangest Civil War ghost story you will ever read. That aspect of the book is very good and creative and interesting. I don’t have much more to say about that aspect of it. The ending is fantastic; brilliant; life-affirming.
I’d like to advance the theory that Lincoln in the Bardo contains a sly defense of historical fiction. A defense, even, of experimental fiction.
Ever since Plato, ethicists have been uncomfortable with fiction. It has an eerie similarity to lying, for them. Aren’t there enough true stories to learn from? Why would you have to make anything up, except to deceive? How can we trust any insights we glean from your fiction, given that it’s not true? George Saunders has never been a dead child. How then can he write about them?
Quotations from historical source documents precede every section of Lincoln in the Bardo. Saunders shows us his research. If he had read even half the books he refers to, most people would consider him well-informed. This is one kind of defense: that the author can read what those who experienced a thing wrote about it. If you trust them, why can’t the author trust them?
But he does better. He gives a lengthy catalog of descriptions of the moon on the night of a particular party. Witnesses describe it as every possible color, and every possible shape. It’s white and full. Half-full and obscured by clouds. It’s blue-tinged. It’s green.
He did the same thing later on with Abraham Lincoln’s eyes. They’re brown. They’re brown-gray. They’re gray. They’re gray-blue. They’re blue.
Meteorological and astronomical science can tell us the moon’s actual shape that night. If Saunders had wanted it, he could have looked it up. But he wanted to show us how unreliable witness accounts are. Platonic critics of fiction are as beset by epistemological difficulties as anybody else.
You want the truth of lived experience? Not even the people it happened to get it right.
So we tell each other stories. And they’re part true and they’re part made up. And we know the author is trying to deceive us. The author is trying to deceive us into truth and beauty and virtue. Stories, even autobiographical stories, even first-hand witness accounts, aren’t true the way scientific measurements, mathematical formulas or religious/philosophical/political doctrines are meant to be true.
Stories are true the way a beating heart pumps blood.
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