In his convocation speech for Syracuse University’s class of 2013, George Saunders urged the graduates: “Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial. That luminous part of you that exists beyond personality—your soul, if you will—is as bright and shining as any that has ever been.… Clear away everything that keeps you separate from this secret luminous place. Believe it exists, come to know it better, nurture it, share its fruits tirelessly.”
To hear a writer of contemporary fiction advocating publicly for the existence of the soul—and the importance of cultivating it—may seem surprising, but the speech reflects Saunders’s entire oeuvre: His works may be funny or violent (or frequently both), but there is an abiding commitment to investigating grace and judgment and to entertaining complicated moral questions.
Saunders is the author of five collections of short stories and two novels, both of which engage with the transitional space between life and death. Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) sees Willie Lincoln, the president’s young son, caught in a purgatorial state, awaiting deliverance to the beyond. And Vigil (2026) sees oil tycoon K.J. Boone visited on his deathbed by a spirit, Jill, who attempts to help him face up to the catastrophic legacy he will leave in his wake.
In this interview with Sebastian J. Langdell, Saunders discusses the literary and spiritual inspirations for his engagement with the afterlife, his own devotional practice, and the way certain personal transcendent moments—moments of unique spiritual insight—have shaped his approach to writing.
Image: You’ve published two novels that deal with the end of life, the interstitial area between life and death, and the earliest steps into the afterlife. That is to say, the novel form has been, for you, a way to explore death and what comes after. When given a broad canvas, you choose to spend time with the dead. Why do you think that is?
George Saunders: The truth is, what drew me to that material a second time is that it was so much fun the first time. That sounds a little silly, but it’s true—the Lincoln book was such deep fun that it made me want to go back to the well. The reason for the fun, I think, is that when you are dealing with the dead, you are really dealing with time, and with impermanence, which is what all literature deals with. But when you’re dealing with that gap between life and rebirth (or whatever comes next), it’s like the volume is cranked up. These souls are unmoored and wild, and we can see them in essence—what they were obsessed with and consumed by (and derailed by) back there in “real” life.
Image: I’m struck by the moral question the spirit Jill voices throughout Vigil. She tells the dying tycoon K.J. Boone: “You are wrong to be so hard on yourself…. You were, after all, inevitable. An inevitable occurrence. Who else could you have been?”
I can think of moments in your other works that present a similar question. We are often faced with unsavory or unlikable characters, and we are asked, Is it their fault they are how they are, or were they just born this way?
Did writing this novel get you any further in contemplating this question?
GS: Vigil represents Jill’s view, with which I agree, but also represents the opposite view, in the person of the Frenchman, with which I also agree. Namely, that in living here on earth, we have to assume that change is possible and meaningful. It’s sort of an absolute (Jill) versus relative (Frenchman) opposition. This felt like a new way to approach the question; instead of trying to side with one view or the other, I think I managed to present both cases well and, in the process, cause some sparks. That seems evident in the critical response, which ranged from rhapsodic to…not. And I’m good with that—I feel like I posed a question that is ultimately unanswerable but that causes some feelings. And when I say unanswerable, that’s not quite true—by accepting Jill’s view, even a little, we might become less likely to do a victory dance when something goes right, and more likely to be patient in the face of someone else’s failure. By accepting the Frenchman’s view, even a little, we might find ourselves exhibiting a more muscular compassion. Which view do I endorse? The answer is both. The answer also might be: It depends on the situation and who is asking the question. I hope this approach made it a more dynamic work of art—an example of Chekhov’s statement that a work of art doesn’t have to solve a problem, it just has to formulate it correctly. That felt new for me, and at this stage of a career (i.e., late) doing something new was a thrill.
Image: Consider yourself in relation to Jill. She comes to realize she has a hybrid status, still partly human (tied to living, not wanting to leave it behind) but also part divine (equipped with immense power and insight). When I read your work, I’m aware of glimpses into the eternal, but also of a very particular brand of humor—scatological at times, surprising and goofy, fun and fearsome. Do you feel this bifurcation as a writer, the way Jill becomes aware of her dual nature?
GS: Yes, and not just when writing. I feel it all the time—lofty ideas, then strange undercutting thoughts; an aspiration to goodness undone by anxiety and ego; all of that. This aspect of Jill really touched me and felt familiar: the urge to come up with some system of thought that was loving and forgiving, that one could hide inside, a moral-ethical autopilot; but then an awareness of that nagging, beautiful world out there, so perfect in all its complexity and roughness.
Another way to say it: At her death, Jill had a taste of the loss of self, or the merging of her self with another, and found that incredibly beautiful. So from that point of view, self-negation would be the goal. (Lots of spiritual traditions teach this, that the self is the problem, or a too-rigid attachment to self is.) But then, there are all those fondnesses and dear memories, all tied to her living body. What’s a person to do? (Exactly, I answer.)
Image: I recently read that you keep a postcard with an inverted American flag at your writing desk, with stars where the stripes should be and vice versa. You said it speaks to what you hope to achieve in your writing. I wonder if you could expand on that.
GS: For me, that flag is a reminder that whatever we think America is, we haven’t quite got it right—or whatever we think the world might be. I also like what that photo does on a visual level—you see that it’s a flag, a familiar symbol, but then there’s this instant of confusion: Oh, wait, I don’t know what this is after all. That’s pretty much the spirit of what I’m hoping to do in my work—put myself and the reader in that state of mind.
Image: It seems meaningful that this new novel takes place between Texas and Indiana, rather than, say, California and New York.
GS: I was just trying to mix things up a bit—although when I researched it, it seems these titans of the oil industry did tend to live in Texas, even after they retired.
But my youth was spent in Chicago and Amarillo, Texas, and Denver, and I have a lot of fondness for those places—the landscape and attitudes, all of that. This book was also a little different for me because my stories tend to be set in places that aren’t necessarily identifiable. Some are in New York State, but lots of them are just located in everyplaces, which I think of as a combo of upstate New York and the Midwest—maybe defined by their non-coastal qualities.
Image: Your two novels have somewhat different afterlives in play, yet there’s also common ground: a focus on interstitial states, a journey toward a moment of epiphany and letting-go; the dead reading the minds of the living and attempting communication with them; a focus on the way the legacies of a life continue with the spirit after death. Would you speak to the spiritual and literary origins of these ingredients?
GS: I think the origins are in Catholicism (especially the idea of purgatory), Buddhism (the idea of the bardo, an in-between space that is more active—a person can change his trajectory through it, theoretically), and ghost lore (the idea that some ghosts are trapped just because they’re not aware they’re dead). I drew on other stories too, of course—Stanley Elkin’s “The Conventional Wisdom,” A Christmas Carol, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” and movies like Wings of Desire. In a weird way, I’ve been developing these ideas over all my years of writing—for example, in the early story “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” a just-dead guy finds he can read the mind of his killer.
Image: In Vigil, there’s a stubborn realism to the way Boone responds while alive. The book seems to ask: If he won’t change, what’s the point of this intervention at the point of death? But there is also perhaps a meta question: Can a depiction of the deathbed debate—in novel form—change the perceptions of the living?
GS: To the first question, I think Boone could have changed—that’s what happens in Dickens, and in two famous Tolstoy stories (“The Death of Ivan Ilyich” and “Master and Man”). I had to write the first two-thirds of the book to see whether this particular guy could change—that was, I hope, one source of narrative tension in the book.
It turns out he couldn’t, until just after his death. Somehow, leaving behind his body and brain gave him that freedom, that lack of attachment to the man he had been. That’s how I read it anyway.
As far as the point of the very late intervention (Boone only speaks once in the book and barely moves at all), that’s also modeled in Tolstoy: The idea is, even if no one else in the world knows about it, it would be better for the dying person to get into a healthier relation with the truth. This might be the last thing he does. And in the worlds of both of my novels, the importance of those last moments is key—people are stuck in these in-between spaces mostly because they died in some deluded or agitated state. Who knows how it is in the real world. But, putting death aside, isn’t it like that in every moment? We lose moment after precious moment to bad ideas and confused emotions and erroneous projections.
As to the second question, I don’t know that my intention was to change the perceptions of the living (although, I guess one could argue that this is the intention of any work of art)—but I know it’s true that if I think about the moment of my death, it makes the next living moment that much more charged and intense.
Image: In Bardo we see the spirits move toward a position of agency, as regards the world of the living—mobilizing, uniting, moving en masse. One of Jill’s major advancements in Vigil is the ability to take on new agency—to not merely serve as a passive receptor of thoughts but to change and affect the spirit and body she passes through. Can you speak to this evolution in your writing?
GS: I find that idea even in the ending of “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” where the narrator, who has just died, bolts through the body of his killer in an attempt to change him—he has no luck, and instead gets a picture of the horror show in his killer’s mind. But I think in anyone, living or dead, our sense of self revolves around the possibility of influencing something or changing something. I’ve heard descriptions of hell that are about the extreme powerlessness one feels there—that nothing matters or possibly could. In a sense, these characters are trying to reassure themselves that, whatever this place is, it isn’t that hell of complete ineffectuality. And influencing the living would be proof that one is not just vapor.
In a technical sense, I’m always aware that, if the reader were on site, he or she would see nothing happening. Lincoln crosses and recrosses the graveyard. K.J. Boone breathes shallowly as his wife comes in and out. In order for the book to matter, I have to believe that mental phenomena are real, just as real as physical phenomena.
Image: In an interview with Image ten years ago, you related an experience you had at a Friday-night mass when you were twelve or thirteen. You felt momentarily included in a “loving lineage” of saints and other Catholic practitioners, and a sense of ecstatic uplift. Do you still bring that memory to mind, and if so, how has its import changed for you over the years?
GS: Yes, that was a real and enduring experience—this thought that whatever wonderful things manifested in the people we honor for their spiritual accomplishments might also manifest in us, even if only briefly. That’s an idea I hold in art as well. And this is a very lively notion in Buddhism, called guru yoga—the idea that the teachings are best transmitted from person to person.
In the case of that experience, I just felt in my heart that it was true, that other people who’d gone before me had investigated love and compassion to the limits and that, whatever I felt, they had felt, and whatever challenges I faced, even the smallest ones, wouldn’t be strange to them. I had a sense of the eons-old struggle that people have had to go through to find out and live into the idea that love is real, and that coming to feel that in a big way is the goal of this whole adventure.
Image: Once, walking down the aisle of an airplane, I had a feeling that every seated passenger was my child, and a sense that this is how God experiences us. I think my training as a writer helped me digest the experience, but also maybe enabled the experience in the first place: the focus on point of view and journeying into the minds and passions of others. Has your career in writing given you different tools for interpreting the transcendent moment?
GS: That is a beautiful example. Thanks for that. My moment was not exactly transcendent, to be honest—it had some ambition in it (I was ready to audition for that lineage), and there was nothing particularly out-of-body about it. I recognize that experience you describe, and those are the kinds of experiences I really trust. For me, they’re connected with practice, and they feel more gradual and earned—one could work toward a feeling like that.
But yes, I think my writing life is built entirely around that moment and others like it. These spiritual moments are a form of being there for a brief dropping of the curtain. The limiting curtain of self and habit and normal perception falls away—all those temporary and delusory things that are just part of how we’re set up at the factory—and we get a glimpse of some larger state of things. Writing can be a way of working back toward that feeling, of trying to see the world, even briefly, through that lens once again.
What I find fascinating is that the writing process (mine, anyway) is pretty banal. I just keep changing words and phrases and moving sections around, by whim, until I really like what’s there. But in that process, I get a feeling of that larger state of things—or a sense of who I might be, how I might see things, if I were more capable of existing in that larger state of things all the time. Just a whiff, just a hint—but that keeps me going.
Image: What does personal devotional practice look like for you, these days?
GS: I’m not doing much, to be honest, except, in the midst of an insane schedule promoting this book while caring for our elderly dog, I try every now and then to say a quick prayer and quiet my mind and take stock of things. And the work with our dog is pretty deep, of course.
Another important component—not sufficient, but also not trivial—is that I am always thinking, “Someday soon I am getting back to practice, with renewed energy.”
Image: I often teach Bardo alongside the Divine Comedy, and we find ourselves drawn to chapter LXI, which seems to offer a glimpse of what awaits beyond the bardo: “Inside, a vast expanse of diamond floor led to a single diamond table at which sat a man I knew to be a prince”—a man who is both Christ’s emissary, we’re told, and Christ himself in disguise. There is song, dancing, gymnastics, deep happiness, and deep sadness. You dwell so much in the transitional realm in your work, and I wonder what it felt like to imagine Christ, heaven, and the ultimate destination? Do you spend much time thinking about what that experience might feel like?
GS: Thanks so much for teaching the book. That makes me happy. That’s how a book keeps living—someone teaches it with love and rigor and thereby passes it on intact.
I did a lot of reading in various faith traditions and noticed that many, if not all, have some version of a judgment scene, often harsh and terrifying, that moment when God tells you how you did. I was channeling and combining a lot of those accounts, trying to essentialize them.
The main thing I’m trying to do is make the scene come alive in the mind of the reader. That is a language task more than an imagining task—although that distinction is a little false, of course. But I find the scene comes alive when an original or specific image comes forth in compressed language. I use the phrase “Christ-emissary” in that scene. I like it better than other choices. It’s strange and particular. Am I, in that moment, imagining Christ, or the facial expression of his emissary? Not really.
The only way I have of thinking about what heaven might be like, or what it might be like to be in Christ’s presence, or Buddha’s, or to be all love—is to remember the times when I was more love (more present, patient; less selfish) and then exaggerate that, mentally. Mentally and, we might say, aspirationally.
I sometimes recall an old Catholic hymn that went: “The mass is ended / All go in peace / We must diminish / and Christ increase.”
A worthy ambition and a good way to spend a life, I’d say.
Sebastian J. Langdell’s work has been featured in the New York Times, Electric Literature, Witness, and LA Review of Books. He teaches at Baylor University and lives in Austin.
Photo by Matea Gregg on Unsplash
