Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, esteemed American short fiction author — can we consider it a fantasy? The winner of the Man Booker Prize for 2017, routinely included on the list of ten greatest novels of the 2010’s — a fantasy? A confounding, disorienting, experimental novel about change and the nature of grief, a fantasy?
Yes, absolutely.
If you don’t know (and I had to look this up, because I didn’t know, either), according to some strains of Buddhism, the bardo is the liminal space between life and death, and the Lincoln named in the title isn’t Abraham, but his son Willie.
The Random House blurb on the credits page calls Lincoln in the Bardo as “a work of historical fiction.” It’s rooted in history, and the historical record is amply represented in the novel, although Saunders uses that record to counterpoint the supernatural elements that predominate the book.
Hmmm. I’ve already written myself into a corner, I admit it. This is too cerebral an approach to a novel about devastating, horrific grief, grief compounded upon grief. Okay, let me try this again.
Willie Lincoln died of typhoid fever on February 20, 1862. Washington, D.C., lay in a swamp, and urban sanitation was not really a priority, especially in wartime. As with most fevers, death from typhoid is excruciating and protracted. The night before Willie Lincoln died, the White House hosted a huge ball, which compounded the grief and guilt that Abraham and Mary Lincoln felt at Willie’s death, that they were hosting an elaborate festive event downstairs in the White House while their beloved son lay upstairs, suffering and dying.
After his death and before his removal to Illinois for burial, Willie Lincoln’s body was put in a borrowed crypt in Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown where, according to legend, Abraham Lincoln visited secretly, one night, sitting in the crypt and holding his son’s body. Now we move from history into fantasy.
Because Willie Lincoln is there. His ghost remains and resists moving on to the afterlife because his father has promised to come to him. When the light beckons, he refuses it, even though it imperils him, and imperils him in a way that the others understand but he doesn’t. He waits because his beloved father has promised he’ll come back.
And he’s not alone. The bardo, where Willie waits, is filled with spirits who have reason not to move on, who either don’t realize or have forgotten they’re dead. They’re lonely, they’re eager to be heard; they’re tired of having endured each other’s stories infinite times. Here are new ears, but they belong to a child and the resident spirits are not so far gone that they would spill adult secrets — about cruelty, lust, sexuality, violence, and all the meannesses and disappointments of our adulthoods — into the ears of an 11-year old. Instead, there’s a new audience for them: us, the reader. And they compete for our attention, sometimes jealously, sometimes childishly, sometimes violently (did I not mention that this novel is experimental?) Yes, we’re the referents, the people who put the mystery together, since the speakers themselves — although the main characters achieve some change and accrue some wisdom through the novel — don’t understand the import of what they’re collectively doing; the story is not being told to them but through them. It’s a bit like Our Town meets Spoon River Anthology, but with ghosts.
The novel begins with historical records, as Saunders draws from newspaper accounts, diaries, personal letters, and written history, to evoke the agitation of wartime Washington, where no one agrees on just about anything. The war is going badly for the Union and Lincoln is getting the blame. The effect is jarring, disorienting; the reality of 1862 in Washington is confusing enough, with a multiplicity of voices arguing over whose reality is the correct one.
Then we move into the bardo, with our main characters, Roger Bevins III, a young man who committed suicide over a lost love and repented too late, Hans Vollman, a middle-aged printer who married a young woman and died before the marriage was consummated, and the Reverend Everly Thomas, who died in old age. The three try to advise young Willie. But it doesn’t take long for other spirits — the refined and the rough, black and white, upscale and hardscrabble — to join in. Out of this multivocality emerges the picture of an age, an age of suffering that is not resigned to suffer, and into it all comes Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln the elder is suffering, too, at the moment grieving the death of his son (and there can be no greater loss in this life than the death of a child, nothing more painful, more devastating). But he grieves more than that — he’s bowed down by the war dead, the suffering of soldiers and civilians, all Americans, all on his conscience. How can a person bear that?
This is the center of Saunders’ novel: how can we go on when the loss is just too much, too encompassing? How can Lincoln turn numb grief into resolve to fight for the Union (remember that in 1862, the war was going great for the Confederacy, not so great for the Union)? It turns out that Willie Lincoln’s entrance into the bardo will bring change to many of its inhabitants; Abraham Lincoln’s entrance into the tomb to hold his son’s body will bring change, too — change to Lincoln himself — all of it unfolding over one pivotal night in February 1862, 162 years ago this week. And I will not spoil it further. It’s a profound novel about the nature of fear and the triumph of compassion.
And it’s a fantasy. Fantasies and ghost stories are not often showered with praise and awarded prizes, but not many ghost stories project themselves into the material world, by which I mean that, in most ghost stories, change reflects backward into the fantastical, not into reality. In Lincoln in the Bardo, the ghosts get the chance to change history — not completely, mind you, but by joining to console Abraham Lincoln and save the soul of Willie, our three main ghosts turn history, inspiring Lincoln, while in the denouement, another ghost turns history again. But you’ll have to read the book to find that out.
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