Chatty ghosts, departed sons make Saunders’ contribution to the Lincoln canon worth its words.
Abraham Lincoln commands such a presence in American literature, biography and cultural memory that it is difficult to imagine a new and unique contribution to the canon of Lincoln memorabilia. And yet, in typically fresh fashion, George Saunders has written a novel that merits status on the shrine.
Lincoln in the Bardo is Saunders’ debut novel; his paper trail of much-acclaimed short stories and essays primed readers to expect excellence from his first book-length narrative. This novel successfully gratifies the outsized expectations that accompany any work by Saunders or about Lincoln. By presenting a composite of historical voices, Lincoln in the Bardo seeks to reveal the tension and significance of a moment in American history as well as the unique attention to the greater good that distinguished Lincoln’s leadership.
The opening lines introduce Saunders’ first narrative device, a collection of individual voices from beyond the grave (in the tradition of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology) that implies the weight of personal protestations contributing to the burden of the presidency. Although the death of his 11-year-old son, Willie, in February 1862 left a grieving Lincoln struggling with personal tragedy while leading the nation in the first year of the Civil War, Lincoln must also endure the knowledge that his is not the only suffering. The war, while still young, had already proved an insatiable black hole for American sons on both sides of the battle lines. Saunders imagines the details of the historical account that Lincoln returned to the crypt several times to cradle Willie in his arms. Integrating the Buddhist concept of the bardo, a liminal state between death and rebirth, he explores how the living cope with loss, pulling back the curtain on the duality of Lincoln’s private pain and public duty by surrounding him with a motley crew of the dissatisfied dead.
In addition to chatty ghosts, Saunders curates snippets of historical texts. Accumulating related sections from previously published works, he pieces together a description of the events surrounding Willie’s death, beginning with the ill-timed White House gala on the night Willie’s health declines and continuing through the burial service and beyond. These nonfiction medleys create a sense of immediacy and provide a multifaceted perspective on the historical Lincoln, emphasizing the distortion of time and legend that pervades even factual accounts. Each fusion of historical fragments creates a unified theme, as if each piece were written to be combined and compared with the others.
What’s more, these sections illuminate the wide range of contemporary opinions about Lincoln’s judgment and leadership. One chapter includes a hail of letters from distraught mothers and disillusioned soldiers blaming Lincoln for the tsunami of suffering. Grieving families denounce him for flippantly sending sons to die while irate racists ironically insist that they enlisted to preserve unity, not abolish slavery. Even his recent membership in the mourning parents club does not create a sympathetic bridge to public approval. His political competency is denounced, and his private character is defamed. By recreating the onslaught of criticism surrounding Lincoln’s presidency, Saunders envelops the reader in the contentious political milieu that surrounded the Union’s grieving leader.
The cumulative effect of the novel is like a collage, sometimes a barrage, a juxtaposition of sources and voices swelling into a cacophonic symphony. The chorus of ghostly narrators combined with the scrapbook of records reveals the limitations of individual perspectives to encompass the historical moment’s enormity. As Lincoln returns to the graveyard to hold his son, beset by torrents of condemnation while wrestling with the past and future deaths of the many American sons, the unseen multitudes of ghosts crowd around him, unused to visitors. Intrigued by Lincoln’s aura of sorrow while imprisoned by their single-minded, individual purposes, their chaotic assembly characterizes Lincoln’s challenge to exist in and serve the collective, to honor his obligation to both the living and the dead. This is where Saunders exercises his signature magic of arousing fellow-feeling via strange and challenging characters. Exposing the pain and longing that plague human souls, he presents Lincoln as the empathetic representative, the tortured guardian of the collective good, the receptacle of pain and figurehead of compassion.
The ghosts, paralleling the torn nation trapped in its own state of limbo, are emancipated from the bardo only when they release their earthly cares and are absorbed into a Whitman-esque communal consciousness. Saunders positions Lincoln as the locus of redemptive empathy, depicting his swelling determination to pursue national unity through the painful necessity of war. Baptized by pain, he is charged to guard the collective, to bring freedom through empathy, backed by the congress of voices (living and dead) calling for restoration. The reader is swept up in the moral balancing act that envelops Lincoln, sharing the visceral necessity of his role as the harbinger of war.
This luminous novel not only illustrates the gravity of a historical moment but provides a window into the tumultuous chorus of needs that Lincoln is duty-bound to address and synthesize, a particular sense of the decisive weight on this much-memorialized figure. In other words, it didn’t win the Man Booker Prize for nothing.
