Jeremy is a Talker, his memory has been erased and he Speaks for his masters in some kind of weird show based on the speech of these enslaved, robotic humans. It prepares for the great Action, in which they will be based on the battle of Big Horn, the great defeat of General Custer. This is the dystopian backbone of the first story of The Day of Liberation (Editions de 1984/Seix Barral, with translation respectively by Yannik Garcia and Javier Calvo), the new book by George Saunders (Amarillo, Texas, 1958), considered the great author of the American short story today.
The nine stories in the book, some fantastic and others more realistic, share the same strangeness. How do you decide whether to pull on one side or the other?
I confess that I do no planning before I write, and only one story at a time, hoping that each story will be difficult and a challenge that I can solve to start the next one. Normally, and this was the case in this book, I don't reject any ideas, I finish all the stories I started, I type and type and I guess the subconscious helps me finish them, until they seem perfect.
Do you work with the idea of the book in your head or do you go story by story?
Oops, even smaller than a story! I only work on the section of the story I'm in, and usually sequentially, so I revise a lot. If a page seems terrible to me I rewrite it, until I have half a page that is fine and I move on, and little by little it grows. If I go through the first two pages and believe it completely, I wonder what comes next, so I go, section by section.
In one of the stories, a woman writes in fragments, rejects them because they seem bad to her, changes and moves forward according to the reality that surrounds her. Are you writing, then?
Yes, it's me, although if I have an idea, I write a sentence and start from there. She doesn't, she thinks it's low and she just changes and moves on. I don't think it's a joke, but the subconscious has brought it up and I give it time. I have a tendency, especially when I was younger, to worry about how I'm going to finish it, but over the years I've learned that almost any crap that comes out of your head, if you put it in front of you and work at it, you can make it better, and if it gets better it's no longer crap, just dirt, and if you keep working at it there may be some gold, but you have to be patient and also trust that your subconscious is going ahead of you. It's slower, that's for sure.
Thus, a good tale could emerge from the beginnings of a narrative that his character rejects.
Look, the first section of that story came from another story published years ago where there's a little boy who falls into a pond and there was a scene with the mother at home worried, but the scene wasn't needed and I took it out - and I kept it. Sometimes I go to that archive and look to see if there's anything funny, and I took that piece out and gave it independence, its own story to live, I put it at the beginning and the story grew around it. I almost feel like the scene is thanking me for taking it out of that story to which it didn't really belong.
The idea of punishment is constant throughout the book…
Yeah yeah. I was raised Catholic, so we constantly make mistakes and should be punished. I don't think much about themes when I write, although they are there, of course. I create a character, and during the revision it becomes more concrete, but what has to happen to him to make a change?
If he knows where he's going, isn't he funny?
Exactly, because then there is no intimate relationship between reader and writer, only condescension. It's me saying: "I believe this, you shut up and believe it". Whereas if you let it come out as you write, it's confusing, there are contradictions and ambiguities. I'm a big Chekhov fan, and he always makes you suspend judgment in a way that I don't in real life, I'm very political and very critical, but a narrative makes you realize how quickly you judge normally .
There is a lot of politics in the book.
Yes, partly because I wrote it during Trump's tenure. At the same time, if a story agrees with what I think politically it worries me, because I don't think it's enough, but I'm not the most subtle writer, and sometimes I take my daily political ideology and I put in a distorted mirror.
At the end of the stories, the reader finds some characters for whom nothing is going well, but not completely bad either, that there is a wall against which we knock again and again, a feeling of being lost... .a bit like the world.
There comes a point in the story where you can move the story toward a positive outcome, and every time I got there, it felt like I was faking it, like I was denying what had just happened. It's not that I think the world is shit and I'm going to write a sad story, because sometimes I think the world is wonderful. I believe that life is everything, so if some stories say that sometimes we get into trouble that we can't get out of, then it is, or if we get into trouble and the only way out is by thinking- there differently.
Plant a revolutionary seed that we don't know if it will germinate or not...
Yes, that's the beauty of stories, you can tell them and then you'll see if they go in one direction or another. But another thing I really believe is that even if I tell you a very sad story, if I make you laugh while I'm telling it to you, or even if we just feel together while you're reading it, with my arm around yours shoulder, that's very positive, it's the most positive thing, and whether the couple gets married in the end or not... it's a Hollywood idea. The happy ending is when you and I, reader and writer, have been through something together and feel closer at the end.
Language is an essential component in many of the stories.
Words move the world, they are the way we conceptualize and articulate things. If I say, for example, "the patriotic wonder of a man", or "a great braggart who hides behind a flag", they are two different things. I come from a working-class background, and when I was young I remember being very passionate and very inarticulate, talking a lot, and very fast, but as I got older I started to read more and I started to be, I think, a little more articulate, and indeed I had access to a higher register of conversation and thought, and that was important in my life. And this ability to be able to change register, to be able to play with confusion or precision is present in my literature. Someone told me that everyone is a Buddha until they start talking.
In that case, at least you are a Buddhist…
Yes, Buddhist, but not Buddha, no! It's the idea that we have access to something quite deep and quiet, but when we start talking it all gets messy, and it's wonderful for literature. The other side is when we use the usual language for convenience, because nowadays it masks the reality, which is very complex and multi-tonal. Language has also become a corporate tool, and these large entities use it to calm everyone down and ultimately distance us from reality. So literature also serves to remember that we don't know anything, that we don't control anything and life will bite us in the ass.
But we have to keep fighting, don't we?
Yes, it's another way to celebrate, or to be positive: this life is a bitch, but I'm happy to be here, and right now I don't want to be anywhere else. The stories are about playing, because no one gets hurt, a way to exercise art and the mind.
Is finding the narrator and voice for each character the hardest part?
No, that's the easy part, and what I love is when a good voice comes along, one that I can do, it's the best because then I don't have to worry about anything, I just have to keep writing that voice and he will tell me what will happen.
