Abraham Lincoln is alive and well, at least judging by pop culture. Not long ago, he got remade as the hero of a Steven Spielberg movie, a rare honor which puts him up in the stratosphere alongside Indiana Jones and E.T. Around that same time, another film featured the exploits of Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter —perhaps the strangest cinematic depiction of a US President in the history of Hollywood. Not to be outdone, the TV series Parks and Recreation followed up with an episode featuring a stripper, dressed as 16th president, who exercises a very different kind of executive privilege at a bachelorette party.
Talk about versatility!
Yet for sheer conceptual daring, it would be hard to top Lincoln in the Bardo , the Man Booker Prize-winning 2017 novel by George Saunders. Much like the vampire-hunting Lincoln, the protagonist of this book is intent on dispatching the undead on their journey to the hereafter. But the odd quirk to Saunders’ novel is the author's commitment to historical accuracy even while he embraces the most fanciful aspects of the supernatural.
In fact, roughly a quarter of this book is presented in the form of direct quotes from memoirs and scholarly works about the Civil War era. Not all of the extracts are real, but these passages still manage to convey a sense of scrupulous verisimilitude. But the rest of the book is presented through the shifting perspectives of more than a dozen ghost narrators. They reside in the bardo —a term from Tibetan Buddhism that refers to an intermediate zone between life and death. Saunders refuses to provide much theological background here, and the readers are allowed (or perhaps forced) to assign their own metaphysical interpretations to the unfolding incidents.
In fact, even the ghosts here aren’t sure where they are or what they’re doing. They prefer to believe—or at least pretend—that they aren’t really dead, just sick. Coffins, for example, are described as sick boxes, and a host of other circumlocutions are employed to avoid confronting the truth of their condition. But even these souls in denial are aware that there is another stage of the afterlife awaiting them outside the bardo. But who knows what it involves—perhaps a final judgment, maybe reincarnation, or total annihilation? Our various narrators are drawn from the ranks of those who remain behind in this intermediate zone, unwilling to move onward, whether out of fear or denial. Yet staying behind comes with some downsides: these ghosts must periodically return to their deteriorating physical bodies and are limited in their ability to move outside the precincts of the cemetery.
In an intriguing twist, Abraham Lincoln holds the key to liberating these souls in the bardo, just as he freed the slaves in actual American history. He remains the Great Emancipator even in the context of this eccentric ghost story.
But here’s where it gets stranger. The Lincoln in this bardo isn’t the famous president, but rather his son. This is where our historical sources fill in the gaps. Willie Lincoln died at age eleven of typhoid fever, shortly after the start of the Civil War. President Lincoln was so overwhelmed with grief at the loss of his son that he made several visits to the crypt after the funeral in order to hold the dead lad’s body. When Saunders learned about these emotionally-charged interactions between the most powerful man in the United States and a lifeless corpse, he saw the potential for a very different kind of historical novel. This book has nothing in common with, say, Gone With the Wind or The Red Badge of Courage . Perhaps the closest counterpart to Lincoln in the Bardo is Toni Morrison’s Beloved , another work of fiction set during the mid-nineteenth century that merges a ghost story with a charged account of the tumult and sufferings of American life at a decisive juncture in history.
But unlike Morrison’s book, Lincoln in the Bardo is unabashedly postmodern, constructed out of fragments and citations. Saunders’ book consists of 108 brief chapters, and most of the chapters juxtapose different narrative voices. At times, the experience of reading this book resembles paging through a notebook or journal filled with isolated self-contained paragraphs. Eventually a series of stories emerge, both about President Lincoln and his son, as well as the various spirits lingering on the premises of the Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown.
Abraham Lincoln’s visits to this cemetery set off a series of crises and conflicts among the bardo community. The focal point of the story is Willie Lincoln’s uncertainty as he counterbalances his desire to stay around in close proximity to his father, or go on to the next stage in the mysterious cycle of the afterlife. But other characters are faced with similar decisions and beset with mixed emotions. Saunders artfully shows how the President manages to resolve these unseen problems even as he deals with his own mourning and melancholy disposition.
I admire this novel, but must express intense dissatisfaction with a literary establishment that refuses to acknowledge that this book is, at its heart, a work of supernatural fiction. How can Lincoln in the Bardo win the prestigious Man Booker Prize, yet not even get considered for the Hugo Award? Why wasn’t Saunders’ work nominated for the World Fantasy Award? How could it fail to get mentioned as a contender for the Bram Stoker Award—a prize that’s even named after an author who made his reputation via a novel that deals with a similar intermediate zone between life and death? I can understand, at least to some degree, the marketing-driven decisions of publishers, but the people voting on these awards should know better. Do they really want to exclude books from consideration merely because they are bold and well written, and not stuffed to the brim with genre formulas?
Perhaps we should acknowledge that books can also exist in strange intermediate zones. But tho se literary ghetto exists only because of biases among the people who m ake these peculiar distinctions and inexcusably bad decisions . I’d like to see that bardo eliminated, its gates torn asunder by another great emancipator, perhaps one wielding a pen. But I fear it will outlive all of us.
Ted Gioia writes on music, literature and popular culture. He is the author of ten books. His most recent book is How to Listen to Jazz (Basic Books).
How can Lincoln in the Bardo win the prestigious Man Booker Prize, yet not even get considered for the Hugo Award? Why wasn’t Saunders’ work nominated for the World Fantasy Award? How could it fail to get mentioned as a contender for the Bram Stoker Award ?