February 22, 2006

By ROSETTE ROYALE
Staff Reporter

Satire, Lenny Bruce once mused, is tragedy plus time. It’s also a damn hard thing to pull off. But when it works, ahhh, it has the ability to transport you to an unknown world. Being swept up into the fictional realm of writer George Saunders can provide just such a ticket.

Author of two short story collections and a children’s book, Saunders’ work features characters who are human just as often as they’re not. This intersection of the imagined and the “unquestiionably” real offers fiction readers a new appreciation for our supposedly banal world, as well as for the power of the written word.

In his latest novella, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (Riverhead Books, $13,) Saunders offers a little ditty about the residents of the imaginary Little Horner, who find that when their country shrinks, the neighbors in the now larger Outer Horner are less than neighborly. Actually, under the direction of their leader, the eponymous Phil, Outer Hornerites become downright genocidal. Mayhem, destruction, and, surprisingly, transcendence ensue.

During a recent stop in Seattle, Saunders chatted freely in the fireplace-warmed lobby of his hotel, while all around, other guests clad in holiday-inspired clothing made merry. What a perfect setting to talk of jazz, genocide, and snow in the Arab world.

Real Change: What sort of satirical tradition are you in line with?

George Saunders: I grew up in Chicago, on the South side. People there are very loving and are very sentimental. But they don’t have the language or the inclination to express it, so everything is done kind of back-door. If someone loves you, they never say you are a fantastic person. They pretend to knee you in the groin, and they give you a, “Now you get outta here!” All that combined with a kind of low-level hatred for injustice. The people I grew up with in Chicago, the working-class people, they really understood “giving the people the shaft” — and they didn’t like it. It was that school of thought that said maybe that the best way to get at the truth was not necessarily with the direct line.

RC: And Phil, how does that story go around the back door?

Saunders: I kind of vaguely had in mind the Holocaust and Rwanda and genocide, those kinds of things. What I wrote myself into understanding in that book was just that if you take a group of three people and give them a week, pretty soon it’s going to be two against one. But what I am really doing is just riffing in the current moment with whatever idea comes to me.

RC: When you say, “riff”, I think of jazz, I think about Chicago. What is your feeling about jazz music?

Saunders: Well, I came to it late. When I was a kid, it was all Boston and Kansas and that kind of crap. But as I come to see it more, jazz is very much like fiction: you wake up on a certain day, and you have a certain set of tendencies and feelings and all this, and you sit down and you start going. Then the next day, hopefully you get the energy again. A book is made up of hundreds of short takes, when you were sort of in the energy of the moment. You know, I teach writing for Syracuse [University], and one of the ideas that is very hard to articulate, but true, is that your conceptual mind is your enemy as a writer. So I think in that way, writing is very similar to jazz.

RC: Do you think in our society we rely too heavily upon the conceptual mind?

Saunders: Yes. Yes. Maybe more than any other culture in history: very materialized, very linear, very analytical, very reductive. That’s why I think we are in trouble, personally. We are in a real decadent period that is characterized by extreme materialism and extreme conceptual thought. [pause] I think. [laughter] You know, I just went to Dubai for GQ magazine. [Ed. note: Dubai, a city in the United Arab Emirates, sits on the southwestern coast of the Persian Gulf.]

RC: What were you doing for them?

Saunders: I just wrote a piece that was in the Nov. issue: seven days in Dubai, kind of a travel, adventure, funny piece. When you go there you see that, of course, an Arab society is multi-leveled and complicated. Any given human being over there can be related to you, as long as your concepts don’t get in the way. That was a real revelation for me. When you start doing this very daring thing, of looking at the human being under the concept, that is the only way you can love anybody. In my view, that is where we have gone off: We are so heavily concept-driven that it shuts off the possibility of real change, real transcendence.

RC: What would be a true transcendence?

Saunders: I think that every moment is a possibility of transcendence. I mean, I’m Buddhist, so in Buddhism, every moment is completely open — except, then as you conceptualize about it, the walls come up.

RC: So you go to Dubai. But what’s your knowledge of the Arab world?

Saunders: Nothing. I don’t know anything. If you would’ve asked me, I would have said the right things, but somehow, in my heart, I wasn’t crediting its full complexity. So for me, it was just like having your ass handed to you and the world saying, “Do you really think you know that much?” I think to be reminded of that every day would be such a blessing. I went to this thing, it was — they call it — it had a really funny name like Snow Ice Crystal Palace Industries or something. They refrigerate a room about this size [referring to hotel lobby, roughly 15 by 25 feet]. It was 20 degrees, and in the middle, they have snow so the kids can see snow. Except it’s not snow: it’s kind of like a Syracuse [New York] parking lot; you know, big chunks of ice. And then they had a line of about 1,000 people, all these Arab families bringing their kids. That was the best geo-political lesson ever. I mean, would I ever have imagined myself being in an air-conditioned cardboard castle, watching a bunch of Arab kinds playing in the snow? No. And that moment opened my heart.

RC: Other than going to Dubai, are there other ways to see the beauty in people?

Saunders: Frankly, meditation is the best thing I have ever found. But also, just to check yourself: Ask, “I’m looking at this person and what are my assumptions?” Art is a great way to work through those assumptions. For me, re-writing stuff is a great way to work towards a bigger heartedness. So, in Phil, I thought: What’s the real truth here? And my thought was, all your anxiety, all your fear, all the things that make people want to beat someone else up: those are basically delusions. You’re fine, everyone’s fine. Hitler, you’re fine. Now, whether or not that would do anything for anybody, I don’t know. But the whole book was something I was playing with, sort of a kid’s book that went awry, becoming a genocide fable.

RC: That’s not a term you hear too often.

Saunders: No, there’s not that much demand for it.

RC: Now, this may come across as a non sequiter, but what do you think about the war in Iraq?

Saunders: I have a cousin who’s over there now, and it’s kind of complicated everything for me, for obvious reasons. But I think it’s a huge mistake, exactly of the kind we’ve been talking about, which is the neo-cons[ervatives] have this concept of a “shining city on the hill” in Iraq. But think about it: Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, almost none of them were ever in a foreign country as middle-class civilians, like the way that we would go. If you go to Dubai, you’re on the ground, you’re walking around talking to people, trying to find a cab. I know Bush has never been to a country on those terms. So I think that’s why he can then make a concept about Iraq that says, “Oh, we’ll just invade this country and then it’ll be cool.” But that’s on the one side. On the other hand, I hope that Iraq is free and happy and stable and we lose nobody else.

But I think the logic and mindset that got us over there is unforgivable because, in my view, our country doesn’t have a moral center anymore. What do we stand for? I always thought after September 11, there was a moment there, a week maybe, where it seemed like we were going to grow into this bigger country, a country like say Lincoln had in mind, or Whitman, which was: we exist to convert our wealth into well-being for other people. I think the only viable American future is that that attitude applied to the whole world. Otherwise we’re empty, we’re morally bankrupt. If all it’s about is feathering the nest, getting a little fatter, then it’s empty. I think we feel that in America right now.

RC: Reading your fiction makes me think overreaching bureaucracy seems to be the moral fiber of society.

Saunders: And that’s what got us in there: bureaucratic thinking. They never thought: Okay, if I, say, invade Iraq, that means we have to blow up x-number of little girls. But the bureaucracy says [speaking in mock baritone:] Well, freedom is an important concept and Americans stand for freedom and no amount of difficulty stands in the way of Americans’ support for freedom. The next thing you know, there’s 1,700 little girls dead. I don’t think that supportable.

But my cousin is there now, and he’s a great kid. And what he says is, “We opened this many schools today, we distributed this much water.” So I think, in some ways, the people on the ground there, they have the right idea: we’re here, let’s do what we can. But I think it must be a very, very difficult position to be in, to be in a place where they don’t want you, trying to do these things. My whole thing is, you have your strong passionate idea, but you always have to say, “On the other hand…” You have to challenge yourself to go to the other side of the table.