American Dreaming: The Surreal Imagination of George Saunders

George Saunders’ latest book, and his first collection of essays, The Braindead Megaphone, is a testament to both his sanity and the depth of his empathic abilities as a writer. From his imaginative critiques of American foreign policy and the news media, to sketches of the uber-resort that is Dubai (UAE); the dilapidated border towns of Texas and Mexico; and the meditating Buddha boy of Nepal, Saunders brings a quiet dignity and respect for human suffering to everything he writes about. But Saunders is primarily a satirist and a highly comic writer with a sharp, often absurdist critical acumen. Indeed the very first essay of the collection, “The Braindead Megaphone,” offers a pointed critique of the American media establishment, setting the tone for the entire book, where each essay in one way or another deals with the problems of perspective and bias. In this title essay Saunders explores again the question that seems to dominate so much of his fiction: how much of the world is really our world and how much is it something that has been manufactured for us? Where does the line between product and person end? And how are our lives shaped by the messages we receive from the media?

Saunders’ central image of the braindead megaphone operates as a kind of absurd conceit for the present state of the American media establishment. The American media, Saunders suggests, is like a man with a megaphone, walking into a nice, polite cocktail party.

He’s not the smartest person at the party, or the most experienced, or the most articulate.

But he’s got that megaphone.

Say he starts talking about how much he loves early mornings in spring. What happens? Well, people turn to listen. It would be hard not to. It’s only polite. And soon, in their small groups, the guests may find themselves talking about early spring mornings. Or, more correctly, about the validity of megaphone guy’s ideas about early spring mornings. Some are agreeing with him, some disagreeing – but because he’s so loud, their conversations will begin to react to what he’s saying. As he changes topics, so do they. If he continually uses the phrase “at the end of the day,” they start using it too. If he weaves into his arguments the assumption that the west side of the room is preferable to the east, a slow westward drift will begin…

George Saunders

Saunders is not the first writer or critic to attack the stupidity and banality of the American media. Indeed, the idea of a stupid, irresponsible media seems to be a given among most intelligent Americans. It has even become the foundation for a whole cottage industry of satirists from the writers at The Onion to John Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Yeah, the media establishment sucks! So tell us something we don’t know. What makes Saunders’ essay so successful, however, is precisely the absurd and inventive, but deadpan way that he goes about his critique. Saunders is really a working class writer and this is both a virtue and a fault. His ideas are never any more complex than what the average fifth grader could comprehend with a little effort, and his language and vocabulary, like many satirists, are remarkably accessible and completely free of pretension. This often seems to work well in his short stories, carried along as they are by the brilliancy of Saunders’ imagination, but in these essays his language more often than not falls flat, and one is left with nothing but a few good ideas and some sketchy descriptions of faraway places. The ideas that he generates, however, can be intriguing. The story of the “Megaphone Guy,” as strange as it is, is woven into a larger, more complex and evocative analysis of the Iraq war and the 10 O’clock news and how these two abominable failures of American society are, in some sense, the result of our increasing inability to tell good stories. “Megaphone guy is a storyteller,” says Saunders, “but his stories are not so good,” and the consequences of bad storytelling can be devastating.

Our venture in Iraq was a literary failure, by which I mean a failure of imagination. A culture better at imagining richly, three-dimensionally, would have had a greater respect for war than we did, more awareness of the law of unintended consequences, more familiarity with the world’s tendency to throw aggressive energy back at the aggressor in ways he did not expect…The shortfall between the imagined and the real, multiplied by the violence of one’s intents, equals the evil one will do.

The rest of the collection seeks to present a positive example of the kind of good storytelling that Saunders says he values and is largely divided between these kinds of strange political essays – including a remarkable and admirably earnest four page manifesto at the end of the book – a series of magazine-style feature articles, many that he wrote for GQ magazine, and literary analyses of predictable Saunders influences: Donald Barthelme, Kurt Vonnegut, and Mark Twain.

One particularly astounding and evocative image – the objective correlative of the entire book, really – can be found in his essay on Dubai titled “The New Mecca.” Here, in what he describes as an enticing but unsavory resort city on the Arabian Peninsula, among the most amazing wealth and privilege imaginable, surrounded by perfectly fabricated theme worlds, Saunders captures well the image of the international working poor who make this world of wealth and pleasure possible.

The dance floor is packed, the whole place becomes the dance floor, the rails are now packed with dancers, a Lebanese kid petulantly shouts that if this was fucking Beirut, the girls would be stripped off by now, then gives me a snotty look and stomps away, as if it’s my fault the girls are still dressed. I drop my wallet, look down, and see the tiniest little woman imaginable, with a whisk broom, struggling against the surge of the crowd like some kind of cursed Cleaning Fairy, trying to find a small swath of floor to sweep while being bashed by this teeming mass of International Hipsters.

As great as some of these essays are, however, many of them seem like mere distractions from Saunders’ true genius for short fiction. In fact, this reviewer at least, wishes that Saunders would stop taking money from GQ to fly all over the world and spend a little more time in his study with his own imagination, for, while the essays in The Braindead Megaphone are often very touching and sometimes brilliantly bizarre, Saunders’ political analysis in these essays is weak at best. In fact, his recent decision to go ahead with a glowing article for GQ (November, 2007) on Bill Clinton, despite the fact that the magazine killed an unfavorable article on Hillary Clinton in order to gain access to her husband, is a little more than problematic. Not to mention the fact that Saunders’ good nature, his empathy and his kindness are hardly sufficient weapons against the allure of global capital and corporate media such as GQ. Indeed, because he tries to be so fair-minded and open in these essays, he sometimes comes across sounding more like a starry-eyed philanthropist, in reverential awe of the sheer constructive power of global wealth, than a sharp-minded critical essayist. The fact that he has more than once mentioned Ayn Rand as one of his influences is, of course, no help either.

In Persuasion Nation, on the other hand, is possibly Saunders’ greatest, most daring, and most original collection of short stories to date. Like his other short story collections, including Civil War Land in Bad Decline (1996), and Pastoralia (2001), In Persuasion Nation offers a not so subtle critique of post-industrial America, where our lives, or what we think of as our lives are increasingly dominated and manipulated by the manufactured worlds of consumer capitalism.

Consider the opening story titled “I can Speak!™.” Framed as a rambling and oddly personal business letter in response to an unsatisfied customer, the whole story revolves around the merits of the “I CAN SPEAK!” learning tool, which, we soon learn, is actually nothing more than a talking electronic mask for infant children that can

Recognize familiar aural patterns and respond to these patterns in a way that makes baby seem older. Say baby sees a peach. If you or Mr. Faniglia (I hope I do not presume) were to loudly say something like: “what a delicious peach!” the I CAN SPEAK™, hearing this, through that hole, that little slotted hole near the neck, might respond by saying something like: “I LIKE PEACH.” Or: “I WANT PEACH.”

Of course the idea of a learning product that is also a mask is a pretty straightforward and amazing metaphor for our slow descent into a virtual fantasy world of consumer bliss and ignorance. In Saunders’ world, even our children, it seems, have become mere playthings by which we seek nothing more than entertainment and distraction. What is really terrifying about this story, however, is just how closely, in spirit at least, the “I CAN SPEAK!” resembles actual learning tools for children and how subtly Saunders develops the rising action of the story by slowly revealing the product’s actual function and rationalizing its use as the story progresses.

But now when childless friends are over, what we have found, Ann and I, is that there is something great about having your kid say something witty and self-possessed years before he or she would actually in reality be able to say something witty or self-possessed. The bottom line is, it’s just fun, when you and your childless friends are playing cards, and your baby suddenly blurts out (in his very own probable future voice): “IT IS VERY POSSIBLE THAT WE STILL DON’T FULLY UNDERSTAND THE IMPORT OF ALL OF EINSTEIN’S FINDINGS.”

Baby Einstein™ anyone? Like all good futurists everything that Saunders writes about seems at once frightening and inevitable, waiting for us just around the next corner, in the next shop window, or displayed upon the next public television screen.

Saunders’ real genius, however, is his remarkable powers of empathy. The “characters” of these stories – if you can call them characters, since some of them are as abstract as a torn piece of candy wrapper and a self-conscious sitcom character – are always rendered with an amazing sensitivity to human error and stupidity. Even the non-human characters, of which there are many, are more than capable of extreme levels of suffering and joy, transcendence and brutal violence. Take for example, the longest story of the collection, “Jon.”

Jon is an adolescent boy, who we slowly discover, is one of a small minority of celebrity human product testers. Jon and the other adolescent boys and girls who comprise the “demographic category of White Teens,” reside entirely in a sealed off testing facility and spend their entire physical lives surrounded with new products and their mental lives plugged into a commercial world, where their every thought and their every feeling is grounded in one commercial cliché or another. When Jon imagines having sex with one of the girls at the facility, the only precedent feeling that comes to mind is an MTV television show.

Then came the final straw that broke the back of me saying no to my gonads, which was I dreamed I was that black dude on MTV’s Hot and Spicy Christmas (around like Location Indicator 34412, if you want to check it out) and Carolyn was the oiled-up white chick, and we were trying to earn the Island Vacation by miming through the ten Hot ’n’ Nasty Positions before the end of “We Three Kings,” only then, sadly, during Her On Top, Thumb In Mouth, her Elf Cap fell off, and as the Loser Buzzer sounded she bent low to me, saying, Oh, Jon, I wish we did not have to do this for fake in front of hundreds of kids on Spring Break doing the wave but instead could do it for real with just each other in private.

In any one else’s hands this would seem merely vulgar and degrading, and the reader would have no connection with these seemingly vacuous teenagers, but Saunders manages, even in this setting, to actually give his characters an emotional depth that is heart-breaking. By the end of the story, as Jon and Carolyn make the difficult transformation back into the real world it is hard not to sympathize and even identify with the sheer terror of that change.

If “Jon” can be understood as a metaphor for fortress America, protected from the “reeks and wrecks” of the working classes of the third world, “Brad Carrigan, American” is even more explicit in its condemnation of the absolute apathy that wealth and consumer culture breeds. In this story, Saunders explores the thoughts and emotions of a real life sit-com character. On the surface Brad Carrigan seems like a normal American man, with a beautiful wife, an incorrigible trickster of a dog (actually a sock puppet), and a Native American neighbor who likes buttered toast. But Carrigan, like all of us, it turns out is haunted by fears of being “cancelled” – in Saunders’ world this means being placed in the grey featureless back of a van until you slowly disappear into the void – and it doesn’t take long before Saunders characteristic dark humor begins to infect Carrigan’s world. In an absurdist plotline that recalls the best of Samuel Beckett’s work for the stage, Carrigan’s life slowly begins to collapse around him. As the Carrigans and Chief Wayne sit around watching other television shows, “previously they had never watched other shows on their show,” says Carrigan, the back yard morphs into “a vast field of charred human remains.”

‘We’re Belstonians,’ says one of the corpses, lying on its back, hands held out defensively, as if it died fending off a series of blows. ‘Our nation is comprised of three main socioethnic groups: the religious Arszani of the north, who live in small traditional agrarian communities in the mountainous northern regions; the more secular, worldly Arszani of the south, who mix freely with their Tazdit neighbors; and the Tazdit themselves, who, though superior to the southern Arszani in numbers, have always lagged behind economically…’

The corpse’s story goes on for another two paragraphs before Brad replies “Wow,” “That’s so complicated.” “‘It might seem complicated, if the person trying to understand it had lived in total plenty all his life, ignoring the rest of the world,’ says the corpse missing an arm, as a butterfly flits from his chest wound to his head wound.” Even in the face of the most gruesome and bleak landscapes, in Saunders there is almost always this butterfly, always some small if insufficient source of hope or comfort. Although Brad is indeed far too domesticated and comfortable to understand the byzantine nature of conflicts in places like Serbia, Darfur or the Congo, Brad’s humanity, despite being a fictional character, is challenged and changed by his encounter with these corpses, which, for the rest of the story he tries to protect from the stinging rain and (don’t ask) feral pigs that are trying to eat them. Although the story is an obvious critique of the ignorance and apathy of the average American, it still offers a surprisingly sympathetic view of Brad, who says finally, desperately “I just want to do something.”

There’s so much suffering . We have so much and others have so little. So I was just thinking that, you know, if we took a tiny portion of what we have, which we don’t really need, and sent it to the people who need it…

Naive, yes; but Saunders is tapping into a deep-seated anxiety here implicitly at the heart of every zombie film ever made. How can we live our lives, our little peaceful suburban lives, when the dead refuse to remain in the ground?

Again, Saunders genius lies not in any original or deep intellectual engagement with these problems, but rather in the way that he captures, ironically, humorously, absurdly, the emotional resonances of our age, our futility, and our deepest despairs.

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