An Ethics Beyond E-Book

Kevin Richard Kaiser

• Herausgeber: Publicacions de la Universitat de València
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Biblioteca Javier Coy d'Estudis Nord-Americans
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 473

Beschreibung

This study examines the fiction of contemporary American author George Saunders in terms of how it presents situations applicable to the chief notions of posthumanist ethics and how these conceptions concern nonhuman animals, which are prevalent in his writing. Posthumanist ethics can help us understand what is at play in Saunders's fiction. Meanwhile, his texts can help us understand what is at stake in posthumanist ethics. This interdisciplinary project may be beneficial both to conceiving new notions of ethics that are more inclusive and, more implicitly, to understanding the relevance of Saunders's fiction to the current American sociocultural climate.

Leseprobe

AN ETHICS BEYOND

POSTHUMANIST ANIMAL ENCOUNTERSAND VARIABLE KINDNESS IN THE FICTIONOF GEORGE SAUNDERS

BIBLIOTECA JAVIER COY D’ESTUDIS NORD-AMERICANS

http://puv.uv.es/biblioteca-javier-coy-destudis-nord-americans.htmlhttp://bibliotecajaviercoy.com

DIRECTORAS

Carme Manuel

(Universitat de València)

Elena Ortells

(Universitat Jaume I, Castelló)

AN ETHICS BEYOND

POSTHUMANIST ANIMAL ENCOUNTERSAND VARIABLE KINDNESS IN THE FICTIONOF GEORGE SAUNDERS

Kevin Richard Kaiser

Biblioteca Javier Coy d’estudis nord-americansUniversitat de València

Kevin Richard Kaiser

An Ethics Beyond: Posthumanist Animal Encounters

and Variable Kindness in the Fiction of George Saunders

1ª edición de 2019

Reservados todos los derechos

Prohibida su reproducción total o parcial

ISBN: 978-84-9134-461-2

Ilustración de la cubierta: “Tending the invalid – A recent sketch at the Zoological Gardens”, The Graphic, London, 1874

Diseño de la cubierta: Celso Hernández de la Figuera

Publicacions de la Universitat de València

http://puv.uv.es

[email protected]

A tots els animals

En memòria de Spencer

Index

Preface

List of Abbreviations

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1Empathy and Satire: The Fiction of George Saunders

CHAPTER 2Beyond Humanism: Posthumanist Ethics

CHAPTER 3The Ethics of Raccoons and Humans. “The 400-Pound CEO”

CHAPTER 4Language, Meat, and Power: “Pastoralia”

CHAPTER 5Determining Who Lives and Who Dies: The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip and The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil

CHAPTER 6Big Pharma and the Christ Monkey: “93990”

CHAPTER 7The Animality of the Human “Puppy”

CHAPTER 8Being Nonhuman: Fox 8

CHAPTER 9Between the Dead and the Living: Lincoln in the Bardo

CONCLUSION

“Maybe We Don’t Know What Process Really Is”: An Interview with George Saunders

Bibliography

Preface

I approach the fiction of the award-winning American author George Saunders from the critical stance of posthumanism. This relatively recent theoretical development has taken many different paths, but the one that I am most interested in following is its deconstruction of anthropocentrism and repositioning of ethics to include “the Other.” Specifically, I am concerned how human and nonhuman animal others relate, especially in terms of ethics, and what this means to determinations of ethicality. The fiction of Saunders, which is often characterized as being both satirical and ethical, provides a place in which to explore notions of posthumanist ethics. His stories, novellas, and his novel all include nonhuman animals, either as characters or as details. Frequently, they are met with violence, abuse, and death. While Saunders does not write about nonhuman animals due to any particular agenda, their appearance in his fiction indicates how interactions with them may become ethical moments in quotidian American life. It is my belief that a study of posthumanist ethics through the acclaimed fiction of Saunders will allow for a greater awareness of just what posthumanist ethics is and what is at stake in conceiving new notions of ethics while also providing a critical examination of what is at play in his fiction and how he achieves what critics hail as his satirical yet ethical style.

List of Abbreviations

Animal

“The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)”

AR

Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory

B&A

The Beast & the Sovereign

CEO

“The 400-Pound CEO”

CL

“Consider the Lobster”

CSM

The Companion Species Manifesto

EUP

“E Unibus Pluram”

F8

Fox 8: A Story

HQ

“Re: Humble Question Regarding ‘93990’”

LB

Lincoln in the Bardo: A Novel

MVS

“Mr. Vonnegut in Sumatra”

NS

“Re: [no subject]”

Outtake #4

“Outtake #4: Having Eliminated Inner Horner, Phil Introduces the Loyalty Suspenders.”

Outtakes

“Outtakes from

Phil

: Introduction.”

P

“Pastoralia”

TBFRP

The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil

TBM

“The Braindead Megaphone”

TNS

“The New Sincerity”

TTA

Thinking Through Animals: Identity, Difference, Indistinction

TPG

“The Perfect Gerbil: Reading Barthelme’s ‘The School’”

TVPGF

The Very Persisten Gappers of Frip

USH

“United States of Huck: Introduction to

Adventures ofHuckleberry Finn

.”

Woof

“Woof!: A Plea of Sorts”

WIWP

“Why I Wrote

Phil

”

WP

What is Posthumanism?

WSM

When Species Meet

WWRD

“George Saunders: What writers really do when they write”

Zoontologies

Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal

Introduction

Unarguably, George Saunders stands in the vanguard of contemporary American fiction authors. His writing has appeared in magazines ranging from The New Yorker to GQ. He has received the National Magazine Award for fiction more than any writer except Alice Munro (both have been honored four years). Likewise, he has been the recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award and a MacArthur “genius grant.” In 2017, he won The Man Booker Prize for his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, and a year later was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. This is only a sampling of the accolades he has received. For his short yet impressive career, which spans about twenty-five years, Saunders, who currently teaches creative writing at Syracuse University, has been honored more than most authors can ever hope to be in a lifetime. Despite the plaudits, his aim is no different than that of any writer: to keep the reader interested. With four short fiction collections, a chapbook, a children’s book, a story-cycle, a separate novella, an e-book, a children’s book, an essay collection, a commencement speech, and now a novel—and a few stray or as yet uncollected writings—he has kept his readers wanting more, meanwhile establishing himself as one of the premier American fiction authors alive today.

He is also extremely humble and generous. I met Saunders once at a reading in Dallas, Texas, the state where he was born. While signing copies of Tenth of December for my wife and me, he asked if we were also writers. We replied in the affirmative, and while I am not certain what expression my wife was wearing, I could not help but think that I must have looked like a star-struck schoolboy. Of all the book signings I have attended, there are few in which I walked away feeling confident about the impression I made. Whether he remembers the encounter or not, I felt content walking away from Saunders because he made me feel like he cared. He said that he was sure we would meet again; the writing world is small. I felt like I mattered, not just as a writer but as a person. I imagine he makes a lot of people feel this way.

Since then, I have exchanged emails with him. Not only was I not ignored but he responded thoroughly. One of the characteristics of his writing that has particularly caught my attention is the integrity and candor of his choices—in terms of language, diction, detail, and subject. The simplicity of his writing style, both in his fiction and nonfiction, comes across as sincere especially because, upon reflection and analysis, the stories present complex scenarios. While some first-time readers may find his stories strange, this is not because what he presents us is far-fetched or unrelatable but because of his stylistic choices, which also make him a fresh and distinctive voice in literature. However, Saunders would be the first to insist that his approach to stories is practical. Here is part of Saunders’s response to a query about ethics in his literature:

I do, yes, think of stories as ethical objects—but I should first say that my way of thinking about stories is very...functional. I feel that my first goal is to make them compelling in some way for the reader—otherwise, nothing happens ethically or aesthetically or politically, because the reader doesn't go on, or does so tepidly. So a story, in my view, should be “ethical” in that I want some sense of outrage or sympathy to rise up in the reader so that she will continue to be interested. (HQ, ellipsis and italics original)

It may seem that Saunders, by his own words, aims primarily to entertain. However, if this is so then why the laurels? What makes his writing different? In this epoch of immersive digital entertainment, why bother to read the fiction of an author like Saunders? Each of his stories is a world in itself, one that exists just far enough from our own that we want to explore its terrain and just close enough to our own to leave us feeling something about life in our immediate world.

Reviews of his stories often focus on the blend of high and low art, the use of jargon and idiomatic speech, and his portrayals of working class America. Occasionally, his style is described as magical realism, but many of his stories could be considered speculative fiction. However, he is not exclusive to any one genre. What is common to his fiction is, as Adam Begley notes in his review of Pastoralia for The Guardian, “an unsettling amalgam of degraded language and high art: slogans, jargon and the crippling incoherence of daily speech, arranged on the page with meticulous care,” including the “brutal solecisms of the American vernacular,” which are played both for laughs and the “odd shot of beauty, too” (2000, n.p.). In his earlier fiction, the characters are usually working class American citizens. However, in the fiction he began publishing in the twenty-first century, the characters became more varied, including an increasing number of children, nonhuman animals, and even abstract shapes or objects. Saunders’s stories also tend to involve what Kasia Boddy, in The American Short Story since 1950, describes as exaggerations “to the point of dystopia some familiar aspect of our late capitalist world before introducing a character who voices, either sincerely or in horror, an alternative vision of enlightened (or at least ‘light-craving’) individuality" (2010, 143-144). Many of his characters are striving to do the “right” thing without always knowing for certain what that is.

Drawing on the work of critics such as Layne Neeper, Julian Nalerio, David P. Rando, Todd Cesaratto, Sarah Pogell, Catherine Garnett, Christine Bieber Lake, and of those found in the first collection of criticism, George Saunders: Critical Essays (2017), edited by Philip Coleman and Steve Gronert Ellerhoff, a book newly published after I began work on this monograph, the following chapters acknowledge what these critics have discovered in the fiction of Saunders while exploring more rigorously some features of fiction that have not yet received much attention. Most of the essays have focused on issues of class, work, postmodernism, or language and style, especially as these topics pertain to contemporary American culture. A couple of essays take on ghosts or zombies, which appear in a few Saunders stories and especially in his novel. Surprisingly, few essays are devoted to satire or ethics, despite constant references by critics to Saunders’s satirical voice and ethical or moral edge. Finally, only one essay, by David Huebert, begins to explore notions of animality, despite the preponderance of nonhuman animals in Saunders’s fiction. None examines the fiction from the particular posthumanist angle that I take up, which is interested in the relations between human and nonhuman animals, nor how Saunders’s notions of ethics relate to those of philosopher Jacques Derrida and many posthumanist theorists.

My intent here is to demonstrate how Saunders’s writing, in particular his short fiction, can help us in several ways. First, it can assist us in identifying the posthuman world in which we reside and in maintaining awareness of the ethical challenges we may encounter. Next, it can provide us with a greater understanding of how this world and its ethical challenges function in posthumanist ways. Furthermore, it may allow us to theorize from a different standpoint. His writing might seem simple and, therefore, more accessible, but it is in no way vapid and is at once as comprehensible and relatable as it is disorienting. Thus, Saunders’s fiction, through an idiosyncratic language (characterized by an unorthodox use of capitals and a truncated syntax, among further rhetorical devices) and the presentation of complex ethical situations, allows us to examine concepts in the form of scenarios that may remain occluded to “straightforward” philosophical theorization. Such concepts give to his fiction, which often converges with “dark” satire, an ethical register that is synonymous with posthumanist ethics, making him an important commentator on contemporary American culture, while also marking his writing as an important resource in posthumanist discourse.

Saunders’s published fiction is comprised of four collections of short stories, a children’s book, a novella, a Kindle single, and a novel, along with two uncollected stories from the story-cycle Four Institutional Monologues (2000),1 “A Two-Minute Note to the Future” (2014)—published on fast-food chain Chipotle Mexican Grill bags2—and the The New Yorker story, “Mothers’ Day” (2016). Additionally, one early story, “A Lack of Order in the Floating Object Room” (1986) remains extant. Along with the fiction, he has also published a collection of essays, The Braindead Megaphone (2007), and an earlier chapbook, A bee stung me, so I killed all the fish (notes from the Homeland 2003–2006), from which some of the essays published in The Braindead Megaphone first appeared. A number of these essays—for example, “Ask the Optimist!” and “Woof!: A Plea of Sorts”—read more like fiction. A few of his essays, such as The New Yorker exclusive, “Who Are All These Trump Supporters?” (2016), remain uncollected. Additionally, a commencement speech, delivered at Syracuse University, is published as Congratulations by the way: Some Thoughts on Kindness (2014). For my purposes here, I focus on the analysis of Saunders’s fiction, using his nonfiction to inform my commentaries where necessary, as I progress through the fiction chronologically.

Before addressing his fiction, I devote Chapter 1 to Saunders’s position in contemporary American literature as a satirical and ethical author, then proceed to Chapter 2, which focuses on notions of posthumanism, as formulated by various theorists, and how these concepts relate to nonhuman animals, the development of posthumanist ethics, and Saunders’s fiction. I then move on to cover the fiction, analyzing one text per chapter—except chapter 5, which examines two—in order to demonstrate how the fiction relates to posthumanist ethics, as well as human and nonhuman animal relationships. Thus, Chapter 3 is an analysis of the short story “The 400-Pound CEO” from the first collection, Civilwarland in Bad Decline (1996). The story, narrated in first-person, concerns an obese man who works for a sadistic employer at a raccoon retrieval operation that kills the raccoons it supposedly rescues and frees. My analysis focuses on how Saunders’s satire of American culture also functions critically, as well as on how his fiction, by being “experiential,” helps the presentation of ethics. Furthermore, I examine how humans determine who is ethically “worthy” and how the story complicates questions of what is ethically “right.”

I follow in Chapter 4 with an analysis of the titular novella from the second collection, Pastoralia (2000), which concerns the lives of two characters, the passive narrator and his rebellious colleague, both of whom work and live on display in a theme park, confined to a simulacrum of a cave, where they are supposed to behave like stereotypical cavepeople. I begin with an inquiry into what language is—that is, as a system of communication that is frequently touted as being exclusive to humans. I then explore how philosopher Jacques Derrida’s notion of “carnophallogocentrism” pertains to the novella. Finally, I take up the problem of utilitarian ethics espoused by the company in the novella.

Chapter 5 is concerned with Saunders’s children’s story, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip (2000), and a novella, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (2005). Both read somewhat allegorically, despite the differences in their target audiences. The former is about a girl who, tired of removing creatures called “gappers” from goats so that the goats will give milk, decides to learn to fish. Her neighbors, who at first refuse to help her, eventually seek her help. My analysis examines the book presents some of the more traditionally humanist tendencies Saunders usually evades in his writing and how, in the story, human livelihood is dependent on the enslavement or killing of nonhuman beings. I follow this brief analysis with another one focusing on a novella about abstract beings called “Hornerites.” When the Inner Hornerites accidentally “invade” Outer Horner, Phil, a rancorous Outer Hornerite who calls the Inner Hornerites a threat, gains support, takes over the presidency, and attempts a genocide of the Inner Hornerites. For my analysis of the novella, I investigate both the published text and the outtakes included on the website, <www.reignofphil.com>, addressing conceptions of who is considered human and how the language and practice of genocide are related to our conceptions of nonhuman animals as inferior.

I return to the short story collections in Chapter 6, which focuses on the story “93990” from In Persuasion Nation (1996). Written as a toxicology report, it is narrated presumably by a scientist who is conducting tests of a drug, the purpose of which remains unstated, on a group of monkeys, each of whom dies or is sacrificed after demonstrating a series of hideous behaviors caused by the effects of the drug—except for monkey 93990, who is immune. I use the opportunity in this chapter to explore the routine sacrifice of nonhuman animals for the sake of human well-being and the role of the biomedical industry, known as Big Pharma, in the United States, as well as the Judeo-Christian influence on notions of life and death. I also dissect how the story’s use of passive voice is indicative of that found in biomedical reports, generating the false sense of an impartial observer.

In Chapter 7, I analyze the story “Puppy” from the most recent short story collection, Tenth of December (2013), which features Saunders’s “ventriloquist” technique, a third-person narrative style that can render thoughts in the first person. The story alternates between the intertwining plotlines of two female characters and their familial concerns. As one woman plans to take home a puppy for her children, the woman offering the free puppy takes pride in how she has devised to keep one of her children safe—he seems to have a cognitive difference and is prone to running across the highway—by tying him to a tree in the backyard. Conflict ensues when the mother who has come to collect the puppy discovers the child tied to the tree. I begin my analysis by examining Saunders’s literary techniques, which include the use of the aforementioned “ventriloquist” narrator, the “communicating vessels” form that shapes the story, and the use of motif. I then explore how Saunders complicates ethics and notions of animality, followed by a Derridean take on the use of naming, sacrifice, shame, and the “abyssal limit” of the human.

I then devote Chapter 8 to Fox 8: A Story (2013), published the same year as Tenth of December but separately as a Kindle single. The epistolary story, which takes the form of a single letter, features Saunders’s first nonhuman animal narrator, the fox of the title, who learns to speak and write what he calls “Yuman” language. When a mall is developed near the home of his fellow foxes, he and his friend set out to befriend the Yumans. After his friend is killed by Yumans, he discovers that his home and his fellow foxes are also gone, leading him to seek out a new family of foxes and to write a letter to Yumans. My analysis starts by covering the story’s use of anthropomorphism, Jason Wyckoff’s conception of “dominionism,” and the privileging of human verbal language. I then move on to explore Fox 8’s own brand of ethics.

Finally, in Chapter 9, I conclude with a reading of the novel Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), which uses a collage technique that allows Saunders to employ a variety of narrative voices to relate President Abraham Lincoln’s late night visit to the crypt where the body of his recently deceased son, Willie, is interred and the effect Abraham’s presence has on the ghostly inhabitants of the “bardo,” a Tibetan Buddhist term for a liminal space between lives but, in the novel, a graveyard. Saunders intersperses chapters that include both real and fictional historical sources throughout the main storyline, which is recounted primarily by three of the “postdead” beings whose goal it is to free Willie from being consigned to the bardo for eternity. I explore the reception of this novel at this point in Saunders’s career and how it relates to and furthers the characteristic features and style found in his short fiction. I end by addressing how Saunders employs nonhuman animals, “posthuman” ghostly entities, and formerly enslaved peoples in a text preoccupied with life, death, and liminality. This final chapter will demonstrate how Saunders’s fiction addresses posthuman issues beyond my focus on nonhuman animals.

I also include an exclusive interview with George Saunders in the appendix. His responses to my questions both complement and, on occasion, contradict my readings of his fiction, which I believe provides a more well-rounded understanding of his writings. Above all, it is important to note how he concludes that authorial intention is indefinable. The way I understand this to mean is that what happens during the writing process may not be consciously intended yet may be felt. As Saunders notes in the interview, feeling is another sort of intelligence, which is important to recognize, especially as it pertains both to writer and reader. I believe that what he chooses to write about—or, more precisely, what strikes him as possible and interesting enough to write about—is intentional in a felt sense rather than a logically considered one. It just so happens that what strikes him as possible and intriguing to write about is what critics pick up on in his writing.

As Jeff Turrentine boasts in his review of Tenth of December for The Washington Post, Saunders’s writing helps us to understand “the connections among sexism, racism, post-colonialism, late-stage capitalism and white middle-class anxiety” (2013, n.p.). I add that Saunders also helps us to understand the connections among further issues, whether they be sociocultural, sociopolitical, ecological, or axiological. In this sense, his writing is interdisciplinary. However, before addressing any of the multiple points I have mentioned, which will unfold in the following chapters, a contextualization of Saunders’s writing is due.

Chapter 1

Empathy and Satire:The Fiction of George Saunders

“The Moral Acculturation of Empathy”: Saunders and Satire

George Saunders follows the sensibility of American “dark” satire, which perhaps stems in part from the American tradition of free speech as upheld in Hustler Magazine v. Falwell (1988).3 American dark satire, especially contemporary American dark satire, is rarely if ever strictly Horatian, Juvenalian, or Menippean; it is satire as a mode rather than a genre. Many critics are quick to indicate the satire at play in Saunders’s stories. However, few have analyzed in quite the manner Layne Neeper has.

In “‘To Soften the Heart’: George Saunders, Postmodern Satire, and Empathy” (2016), Neeper analyzes how Saunders’s satire, as a reimagining of the satiric formula, prods us toward empathy. By staying

with his post-modernist proclivities, Saunders burlesques the quotidian horrors and degradations visited upon characters in a nearly parallel universe to our own contemporary American life, but without even the faintest possibility of prescriptive remedies, instead supplanting the logos of traditional satire, the reasonableness of implied correction, with the pathos of empathetic recognition, an absurd alternative, but the only alternative, given the grotesqueries of Saunders’s fictional worlds and hapless characters that inhabit them. That his work may still be categorized as satirical resides in the fact that the fiction is transactional—readers should feel moved to change, to overcome something—but the sole upshot of Saunders’s satire is to lead to the moral acculturation of empathy in readers, so that we are put in “the proper relation to the truth,” rather than to the inducement to the righting of personal faults or social ills, the avowed aim of the conventional satirist. (Neeper 286-287, italics original)

This transactional quality has been mentioned by Saunders in interviews. For him, empathy comes from a pact between himself and the reader.

One way to reach this empathetic connection is through satire. According to Brian A. Connery and Kirk Combe in their introduction to Theorizing Satire (1995), reading satire is more perilous than “general” reading. They assert that the danger occurs because “satirists specialize in demolition projects. The one thing we know about satire is that it promises to tell us what we do not want to know—what we may, in fact, resist knowing. One is apt to find one’s former consciousness uninhabitable when the work of the satirist is done” (Connery and Combe 1). Connery and Combe may go a bit far to claim that satirists specialize in “demolition projects,” especially because Saunders’s writing is subtler. He does not “tell us” what we do not care to know but insinuates it. His writing, however, does leave the “consciousness,” if not altogether uninhabitable, at least altered. Unlike many satirists, his aim is to attune us to compassion.

Saunders follows the satiric mode found in Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, and Donald Barthelme and unsurprisingly has written essays concerning all three, which are included in his collection of essays, The Braindead Megaphone (2007). In “The United States of Huck,”4 originally published as the introduction for a Modern Library paperback edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Saunders dubs Twain “the funniest literary American writer,” describing his humor as “energetic and true and pure” (189). Huck Finn, as Saunders refers to the novel, addresses politics not by being politically incorrect for the sake of a joke but by showing us the political—and personal—stakes of language made taboo in Twain’s life (most notably through Huck’s quandary over the “nigger,” Jim, and whether to turn him in). Saunders’s assessment is that Twain’s “book was making [Twain] uncomfortable. His comic novel was doing things a comic novel was not supposed to do” because “his subconscious was urging him do things his conscious mind didn’t know could be done, or didn’t particularly want done” (USH 191). Saunders’s writing uses idiosyncratic language in a manner akin to how Twain uses language in Huck Finn: it divulges what is at stake in contemporary American sociopolitical culture. Saunders develops a theory, which he facetiously calls, in typical Saundersian fashion, a “Tentative Narrative Theory” of Twain’s “Apparent Narrative Rationales.” His theory is that Twain’s “tension between various warring parts of Sam Clemens—the radical and the reactionary; the savage satirist and the kindly Humorist; the raw hick and the aspiring genteel Literary Figure—is what makes Huck Finn such a rich and formidable book” (USH 191-192).

Those readers who approach Saunders by considering his similarities with Twain may find Saunders to be an author of similar tension. He is satirical yet kindly, a “blue collar” literary academic, but he seems more aware of these qualities in his writing; his literature entertains not despite its ethical awareness but because of it, even if the goal of writing is not “to be” ethical. Saunders contends that the ethical dilemma at the heart of the book—should Huck turn in Jim or not?—was not always clear to Twain, who

only dimly and imperfectly understood that his book had a Central Moral Vector. Or rather, he knew, but sometimes forgot. Or rather, he knew, but periodically got interested in other aspects of the book and lost sight of it. Or maybe, and most interestingly: his Central Moral Vector was too hot to handle, and would have required him to simultaneously invent, understand, and complete his book in an entirely new genre, a genre that neither Twain nor the world was quite ready for. (USH 197-198)

In Saunders’s fiction, the central ethical dilemmas are generally more clearly pronounced, more in focus than they are in Huck Finn, yet Saunders’s fiction is heir to this style of dark yet compassionate satire, more so than, for example, the satire found in “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”

In “Mr. Vonnegut in Sumatra,”5 an astute essay on Slaughterhouse-Five, or the Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death (1969), Saunders describes humor as “what happens when we’re told the truth quicker and more directly than we’re used to. The comic is the truth stripped of the habitual, the cushioning, the easy consolation” (80). In a sense, Saunders is reminding us of what has become a cliché regarding humor: it is funny because it is true. However, if we believe we laugh despite how we feel, this is not the truth. When we truly understand how we respond to that which unsettles us, we realize that when we laugh at satire we laugh because of how we feel; we laugh to release the tension. Dark satire is that which forces us to confront an unfiltered taboo that is otherwise too painful to consider, whether it be racism or death. We are tricked, in a sense, into confronting this painful issue. This is the reason why Vonnegut is, as Saunders states bluntly, a “funny” writer (MVS 77).

Saunders’s reading of Slaughterhouse-Five leads him to eventually realize that its seemingly absurdist elements are necessary, since “our most profound experiences may require this artistic uncoupling from the actual” (79, italics original). Becoming “unstuck” in time and being held captive by aliens become necessary events for leaving the reader altered by the experience of reading Slaughterhouse-Five. Regarding the novel, Saunders argues that Vonnegut “wrote as if there were a continuum of consciousness between himself and the Terrible Event” because he never claimed that it had excused him from the expected “obligations of being kind, attempting to understand, behaving decently. On the contrary, Vonnegut seemed to feel that unkindness […] had been the cause of his Terrible Event, and that what he had learned from this experience was […] the importance of preserving kindness in ourselves at all costs” (77). The Terrible Event was Vonnegut’s experience during World War II, when, as a captive of the Nazis, he survived the Allied bombing of Dresden by hiding inside the meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was imprisoned. The experience seems to shape the ethics of the novel, which Saunders notes, perhaps because they resonate with his own ethical concerns. When Saunders first read Slaughterhouse-Five, he was struck by the absence of detail, the lack of realism. Only later did he realize that the goal of Vonnegut’s novel was “to soften the heart, to encourage our capacity for pity and sorrow” (79). This is also what Saunders’s writing essentially does. Both the satire and the absurd encourage our capacity for kindness and compassion.

In the essay “The Perfect Gerbil: Reading Barthelme’s ‘The School’,” Saunders describes the rising action of Barthelme’s story, in which the postmodern writer breaks an established pattern—everything that comes into the school dies—while continuing to escalate the plot. According to Saunders, Barthelme “has gotten tired of being polite” so that “[w]ithout worrying about whether it’s allowed, whether it will be understood, or is logical within the world of the story […] he races off in the direction his logic is taking him […] trying to get the story to answer the questions the thing’s been asking all along; What are we to make of death? How are we to live in a world where death is king?” (182). This break in the pattern allows Barthelme to deal with an otherwise sensitive subject.

Barthelme is aware of the game: for the sake of the plot, the action must rise. This is achieved by establishing a pattern, yet this pattern cannot go on indefinitely; once the reader catches on, to insist on continuing the pattern makes the reader feel insulted. Barthelme uses humor in a way that makes it seem as if the story is winking and nudging its reader. The pattern of death is funny, yet the story’s humor is in the service of something else, namely, forcing us to confront death. Eventually the narrator tells us of deaths outside the school, but the point at which the story really takes a twist is when the students begin asking where all the dead have gone. Suddenly, the story is not just about a bunch of dead plants and animals but about the meaning of life. Then the students ask if the narrator will make love with Helen, a character who until this point in the story has gone unmentioned. A story about death becomes also a love story. Of course, when the narrator and Helen begin to be intimate there is a knock at the door—like a knock-knock joke—and a gerbil enters the room. Since we know the pattern, we can assume the gerbil will not live a long life. The absurdist moment here helps us to confront life, love, and death in a final single paragraph. This is not postmodern irony for irony’s sake but an emotionally charged moment that challenges us, ethically, to consider what is important to us in life. Life feels as brief as Barthelme’s story demonstrates, and love may be all we have time to share. Like Barthelme’s story, Saunders’s writing is compassionate because of its dark humor; the absurd elements in his—and Barthelme’s, Vonnegut’s, and Twain’s—stories are not so absurd when considered as necessary elements to affect an emotional response from the reader. Yet, while Saunders may be the most prominent living author writing this type of emotionally-charged ethical satire, he is not the only one.

“America 101”: Peers, Influences, and David Foster Wallace

As easily as Saunders can be compared to his forebears, he also can be compared to certain contemporary American or America-based authors who have achieved prominence on account of their “sincere” writing, achieved either through satire or experimentation with form. Saunders’s writing embodies both. Like Jonathan Franzen and Gary Shteyngart, he is a satirist. Like Jennifer Egan and Junot Díaz, he experiments with form. What sets his work apart is that he creates worlds more than borrows from them. His fiction may reference pop culture, but just as often he creates his own cultures. By distancing his stories from a fully recognizable world through the use of his idiolect, Saunders helps the reader become deeply aware of the sociocultural and linguistic idiosyncrasies of contemporary American culture. Richard Lee describes these worlds as “close enough in their zeitgeist to our own—the occasional dystopic setting or futuristic context notwithstanding that reviewers’ comments since his first collection routinely acknowledge” Saunders as a satirist (2010, 83). He is a “consciously ironic voice who plays with notions of the real and the fictive, a writer who easily ironies the writing situation at both macro- and micro-levels: cultural critique at the large scale, consciousness and perception at the narrative scale” (2010, 83). The worldbuilding found in Saunders’s writing occasionally takes its cues from genre fiction, especially speculative fiction, in a way reminiscent of Jonathan Lethem’s early novels or of Michael Chabon’s later writing, yet Saunders also often draws from lived experience. In the second part of an interview with Patrick Dacey published in BOMB, Saunders describes his life while reading Hemingway, an author he admired but found impossible to emulate:

Living in Amarillo, Texas, working as a groundsman at an apartment complex, with strippers for pals […], goofball drunks recently laid off from the nuclear plant accosting me at night when I played in our comical country band, a certain quality of West Texas lunatic-speak I was hearing, full of way off-base dreams and aspirations—I just couldn’t hear that American in Hem-speak. (2017, n.p.)

Saunders’s jobs have informed his writing. After graduating from the Colorado School of Mines and working as a geophysicist, he also worked as a doorman, roofer, convenience store clerk, slaughterhouse knuckle puller, and pharmaceutical company report writer.6 In an interview with Jana Hoops, Saunders describes his work experience as forming a chapter of his life during which he studied “America 101” and discovered “what our country—and capitalism—are really like, face-to-face” (Dacey n.p.).

Saunders is a constant reader and has been inspired by many writers, especially short fiction authors. He admires the Russian masters of short stories and novellas: Isaac Babel, Anton Chekhov, and Leo Tolstoy. American authors have influenced his writing directly as well. Tobias Wolff, regarded for his short fiction, was his teacher at the MFA program in Creative Writing at Syracuse. Saunders’s satire, as I have mentioned, is in the vein of Twain and Vonnegut. However, his style and tone belong to the present. Among North American authors, for example, his style bears similarities to that found especially in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian trilogy: Oryx & Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013).7 Among contemporary American authors, he is praised by Tobias Wolff, Thomas Pynchon, Jay McInerney, and Colson Whitehead. Preeminent among those who have praised him, however, and the writer whose mission is closest to the heart of Saunders’s writing, is the late David Foster Wallace.8 In an article for The New York Times Magazine, Joel Lovell reminisces about his years at Harper’s Magazine, recalling that around the time of the book launch for the novel Infinite Jest (1996), Wallace was “standing in the hall in his untied high-tops, saying that George Saunders was the most exciting writer in America” (2013, n.p.). This comment came from the author who would, upon publishing Infinite Jest, become the most exciting writer in America.

In his well-received essay, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,”9 originally published in 1993 in The Review of Contemporary Fiction and collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997), Wallace writes that “irony, poker-faced silence, and fear of ridicule are distinctive features of contemporary U.S. culture (of which cutting-edge fiction is a part) that enjoy any significant relation to the television whose weird pretty hand has my generation by the throat” (171). He also contends that his intention is “to argue that irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and that at the same time they are agents of great despair and stasis in U.S. culture, and that for aspiring fictionists they pose terrifically vexing problems” (EUP 171). Saunders’s Civilwarland in Bad Decline, a collection of stories and a novella published a few years after this essay appeared, introduced a writer whose fiction looked both backward and forward at once, while somehow still connecting with the present culture that Wallace describes. Over the next two decades, and increasingly after 9/11, television culture would give way to Internet culture, one in which the American president could win an election by openly attacking Muslims, Mexicans, women—anyone considered the Other—and by being a parody and caricature of himself, meanwhile complaining about the ridicule he receives via Internet media.

Wallace offers two main premises in “E Unibus Pluram,” the first point being that “a certain subgenre of pop-conscious postmodern fiction, written mostly by young Americans, has lately arisen and made a real attempt to transfigure a world of and for appearance, mass appeal, and television,” which seems positive, except that, as his second point indicates, “televisual culture has evolved to a point where it seems invulnerable to any such transfiguring assault” (171). The same can be said of our current technoculture, although, unlike television, it offers us new ways to read. Saunders’s Fox 8 originally was available only as a Kindle Single. While he still publishes print books, Saunders’s work, like that of most contemporary authors, is also readily available in electronic formats: Kindle Editions, online archives, audiobooks—forms which were unavailable or less readily available to David Foster Wallace.

We need not think strictly in terms of the influence of technoculture, however. If contemporary American culture is to be saddled with any modifier, it is more a culture of immediacy. Saunders is regarded for his short stories and novellas; his first novel only appeared after four collections of short fiction. While the American short story has become a praised form, despite the hesitation of publishers to print or promote it, Saunders, without slighting the caliber of his work, may benefit from living in a culture that demands immediacy. His first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), is ambitious but makes fewer demands on the reader’s time and attention span than novels on the grand scale of Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1993), Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). Although Saunders has stated that he was compelled to write the novel, he has always thought of himself as a short fiction author. Even his essays often tend to read more like short stories than essay. Saunders’s shortest text fits on a paper bag—thanks to its publisher, Chipotle. Is this selling out? Is it irony? Unquestionably, it is at least a way to engage more unlikely readers.

The writing of both Wallace and Saunders is as much informed by American culture as it is a response and challenge to it. Likewise, it is a response to the postmodern and, for Saunders (albeit not intentionally or consciously), to the posthuman. Wallace explains, in an oft-quoted response from a 1993 interview with Larry McCaffery, collected in Conversations with David Foster Wallace (2012), that “[i]rony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for,” and “what made the early postmodernists great artists” (48). The advantage of using irony, he notes, “is that it splits things apart, gets above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates” (McCaffery 48). For Wallace, however, there is a point when irony no longer fulfills its purpose. The complication, he believes, “is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, “then” what do we do? Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone” (McCaffery 48).

Postmodern irony becomes the goal to the exclusion of sentimentality or ethicality, a criticism that Wallace himself levies, justly or not, on the fiction of Brett Easton Ellis. Wallace, disturbed by the trend, contends that “[p]ostmodern irony and cynicism become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naïve to all the weary ironists” (McCaffery 48). Instead of liberating literature, a superfluous or unchecked use of irony and cynicism encage it. However, Wallace is not the only author who remedied the emotionless, unethical fiction that he attacked.

“Radical Kindness”: A Posthuman Literature of Compassion

Wallace was a key member of a new generation of writers whose writing is described as sincere and ethical while still using irony. In an important essay, “The New Sincerity” (2016), Adam Kelly claims that George Saunders’s writing is part of this broader artistic cultural trend known as the New Sincerity. Kelly describes the art associated with this trend as generally being “regarded as a sturdy affirmation of nonironic values” and demonstrating “a renewed taking of responsibility for the meaning of ones’ words,” as well as offering “a post-postmodern embrace of the ‘single-entendre’ principles invoked by Wallace” in “E Unibus Pluram” (198). He also suggests that the New Sincerity aesthetic is one shared by many of Wallace’s and Saunders’s peers, including Michael Chabon, Junot Díaz, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, Dana Spiotta, and Colson Whitehead.

For such New Sincerity writers, Kelly argues that “the guarantee of the writer’s sincerity cannot finally lie in representation” (TNS 205). In what reads as a rather Derridean description, this means that “[w]hat happens off the page, outside representation depends upon the invocation and response of another; this other to whom I respond, and whose response I await, is for many New Sincerity writers, the actual reader of their text” (TNS 205). Sincerity is contingent upon the reader. Kelly claims that “in New Sincerity writing, the author and reader really do exist, which is to say they are not simply implied” (TNS 206, italics original). Thus, New Sincerity writing must be understood “as a contingent rather than ideal process that recapitulates the struggle for communication differently and anew in each reading” (TNS 206). Saunders’s irony is not irony for the sake of irony but for the sake of response. How we, as readers, respond, how we feel “differently and anew in each reading,” is the mark of New Sincerity writing.

In an interview for Salon, Saunders admits that irony can be a way to honesty. He does not invoke irony to be honest; rather, by being honest, he is also often sarcastic. Like Wallace, he distinguishes between the uses of irony: “I think the irony or the humor that I like is stuff that is exactly what’s needed to drive that wedge into the truth, and the stuff that I don’t like is the superfluous kind of cleverness” (2014, n.p.). Wallace’s worries are alleviated by Saunders, who does not believe that sarcasm and compassion are mutually exclusive. In an interview for The Missouri Review, Saunders explains that sarcasm and compassion are “manifestations of the same impulse,” with compassion being what he calls “plain sight. If you see something plainly, without attachment to your own preconceptions of it and without any aversion to what you see, that's compassion because you're minimizing the distinction between subject and object. Then whatever needs to be done, you can do it quickly and efficiently, to address whatever the suffering” (2001, 56, italics my own).

The sardonic sarcasm of his fiction allows him to “get away with” sentimentalism. Emotion becomes a relief from irony. The characters in his fiction work toward redemption in the more archaic sense of buying back freedom—freedom from the sociocultural constraints that impinge upon their sense of ethicality, their desire for what Saunders has called “radical kindness” (2007, “Medium Matters”), and what I call, borrowing from his commencement speech, “variable kindness.”10

In the commencement speech, published as Congratulations, by the way: Some Thoughts on Kindness, Saunders describes the same ethical attitude present in his fiction. For him, because “kindness is variable, we might also reasonably conclude that it is improvable” (n.p., italics original).11 Saunders’s sense of ethics is parallel to that proposed by many posthuman writers, including Jacques Derrida, who suggests a hyperethic: ethics beyond ethics. Saunders states a similar idea in a more straightforward manner, describing kindness as an ethics “that expands to include…well, everything” (CBW n.p., ellipsis original). In a 2017 article for The Guardian, he asserts that, in terms of his fiction, he achieves a sense of ethicality by attuning himself to his readers, clarifying that we often believe that

the empathetic function in fiction is accomplished via the writer’s relation to his [or her] characters, but it’s also accomplished via the writer’s relation to his [or her] reader. You make a rarefied place (rarefied in language, in form; perfected in many inarticulable beauties—the way two scenes abut; a certain formal device that self-escalates; the perfect place at which a chapter cuts off); and then welcome the reader in. (WWRD, n.p.)

The point is not to underestimate the reader and to develop a relationship with the reader.

In several interviews, Saunders further explains the relationship between kindness or compassion and his literature. For example, in the aforementioned 2007 The Colbert Report episode, Saunders explains in his first appearance on the show that when prose is “done right” it functions “kind of like empathy training wheels.” Kindness and compassion would become regular points addressed in his three subsequent interviews with Stephen Colbert. Much later, in an interview for the literary website Goodreads, Saunders replies to a query regarding compassion and the subject of his essay for The New Yorker, “Who Are All These Trump Supporters?”. I quote here and in the following paragraph almost the full response because it offers a first-person explanation of Saunders’s ethical awareness:

Depending on how you define compassion, actions are never beyond compassion. Sometimes we misunderstand [compassion] as being this bland, kowtowing niceness: Somebody hits you in the head with a rock and you say, "Thank you so much for the geology lesson." But compassion in Eastern traditions is much more fierce. It's basically calling someone on their bullshit. At the heart of it there's a clarity that would say, If I could press a button and make that person see his own actions, that would be the best. (Goodreads n.p., brackets original,)

By mentioning “Eastern traditions,” Saunders may be alluding to his own Buddhist practice, which resonates with the kind of radical or variable kindness he elsewhere mentions.

Saunders continues by informing us of his own practice that safeguards him from indulging in negative emotions. As he describes it,

I'm just trying to be really watchful in my own heart for any kind of gratuitous negative emotion. I'm [thinking] Jesus was here, Buddha was here, Gandhi was here, Tolstoy was here, Mother Teresa was here, and they all said basically the same thing: Our capacity for understanding the other is greater than we think. It's not easy and we're not very good at it habitually, but we can get better at it and it's always beneficial. It's beneficial to you, and it's beneficial to the other. That's what I say—in real life I'm swearing under my breath on the internet. (Goodreads n.p., brackets original, italics my own)

Here, Saunders references not only historical religious and philosophical figures but Tolstoy, whom we associate primarily with writing but who also later devoted himself to religion. Saunders also claims a premise aligned with posthumanist ethics: “Our capacity for understanding the other is greater than we think.”

This idea is consistent with Derrida’s notion of ethics beyond ethics, which has snaked its way into posthumanist ethics. Saunders does not claim that we can understand the Other, but that we have the capacity to do so. Despite the apparent simplicity of his language, his concept of ethics is careful not to assume that we can wholly understand the Other. Furthermore, critics of postcolonialism insist that we cannot speak wholly for the Other. This does not mean we should not try to understand the Other or, I argue, that we should refuse to try to speak on behalf of the Other but that to do so is difficult, as Saunders duly notes, and, moreover, dangerous. Indeed, thinking we can understand or speak for the Other can turn against us. I will discuss this in greater detail in the following chapter, but we should know that we must be careful never to assume we do know or speak entirely for the Other. Nevertheless, I concur with Saunders’s belief: we have a greater capacity to understand the Other than we generally acknowledge. In short, our power to empathize is greater than we think.

Writing in the 21st century, both Wallace and Saunders seem to become increasingly more ethically aware; that is, their writing becomes even more emotionally engaged. Wallace’s essay on the Maine Lobster Festival, “Consider the Lobster,”12 originally published in Gourmet (2004) and later included in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (2005), is a case in point. That his focus is on the pain of a nonhuman being is key. Wallace reports on the suffering of lobsters boiled alive for human gluttony and considers that

the questions of whether and how different kinds of animals feel pain, and of whether and why it might be justifiable to inflict pain on them in order to eat them, turn out to be extremely complex and difficult. And comparative neuroanatomy is only part of the problem. Since pain is a totally subjective mental experience, we do not have direct access to anyone or anything’s pain but our own; and even just the principles by which we can infer that other human beings experience pain and have a legitimate interest in not feeling pain involve hard-core philosophy—metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, ethics. (CL 246)

For Wallace, the greatest consideration “is that the whole animal-cruelty-and-eating issue is not just complex, it’s also uncomfortable” (CL 246). This uncomfortableness presents a range of moral questions, which Wallace leaves open to the reader to consider.

In “David Foster Wallace and the Ethical Challenge of Posthumanism,” Wilson Kaiser claims that “Wallace uses his own writing to foreground an ethical challenge that does not sit easily within the parameters of postmodernism” (2014, 153). Kaiser’s ruminations on Wallace’s fiction and essays may also be applied to Saunders’s writings. Kaiser argues that “Wallace’s literary worlds, for all their commitment to an ethics, do not assume personal autonomy or an irresoluble answerability to an Other” but “rather are “situated in a concrete engagement with a specific milieu that contains a multiplicity of human and non-human actors” (Kaiser 154). According to Kaiser, the ethics found in Wallace’s “literary worlds” are posthuman rather than postmodern. They avoid postulating generalizing claims, focusing instead on “affinities within a network of possibilities” (Kaiser 155); they rarely moralize. The same is true of Saunders’s writing.

Comparable to “Consider the Lobster” and indicative of Kaiser’s claims, Wallace’s opening sentence to the short story “The Depressed Person,” included in the short fiction collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999), begins “[t]he depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror” (37). Here, it is difficult not to equate Wallace’s own struggle with depression with that of the character, but instead of generalizing depression, the protagonist’s depression is particular. By the end of the story, her therapist’s death has left her questioning her capacity for compassion. Wallace does not moralize but instead presents an ethically complex scenario. As I will evince later, Saunders’s writing also functions in this way: it presents ethically complex situations without any decisive moral.

In a different vein, the first chapter of Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) describes the movements and speech of Hal, a tennis prodigy. The administration comments upon his movements and speech:

‘But the sounds he made.’

‘Undescribable.’

‘Like an animal.’

‘Subanimalistic noises and sounds.’

‘Nor let’s not forget the gestures.’

‘Have you ever gotten help for this boy Dr. Tavis?’

‘Like some sort of animal with something in its mouth.’

‘This boy is damaged.’

‘Like a stick of butter being hit with a mallet.’

‘A writhing animal with a knife in its eye.’ (14)

The sounds Hal makes are later compared with those of a drowning goat, his sounds and actions barely mammalian. He is both compared to an animal, in a derogatory sense, and considered less than animal (subanimalistic) before being compared with an object made from the bodily fluids of an animal (butter). The focus is on the sounds and gestures that are Hal’s (attempts at) language. In his essay, Kaiser conjectures that Hal’s transformation “from a superb human specimen, a remarkable athlete and mental prodigy, to something” animalistic is an instance of “becoming-animal,” as proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (57). Hal’s “pain, travels through neural and physiological networks that are no longer human” (Kaiser 57-58). Saunders’s characters generally do not undergo such transformations, but the relationships between human and nonhuman animals appear with greater frequency, even if only in passing. Furthermore, he alludes to them almost exclusively in terms of violence and death. I explore this relationship in some fashion in the chapters to follow.

“An Inherently Ethical Activity”: Reading Saunders Critically

Until recently, the critical analysis of Saunders has been rather thin, with the appearance of only a few academic essays—upon which I will comment later in this chapter—and a series of interviews and book reviews. However, in 2017, the first collection of critical essays on the author finally was published. The scholarly work examines Saunders’s writing from a variety of angles—linguistic, sociopolitical, biopolitical, psychological, and even theological—making George Saunders: Critical Essays a landmark collection in Saunders criticism. The collection includes an essay by Adam Kelly, who—following his earlier essay on New Sincerity—directly addresses Saunders’s fiction in terms of New Sincerity. In “Language Between Lyricism and Corporatism: George Saunders’s New Sincerity,” he notes how Saunders’s “use of first-person narration supports his New Sincerity aesthetic, allowing him to explore the limits of expressive subjectivity, ethical consciousness, and detached spectatorship under neoliberal conditions” (49). Even Saunders’s third-person narration, which I will address in a later chapter, reads like first-person narration.

Most of the information on Saunders is still found in interviews and book reviews. As the first monograph on the author, this book aims to provide a sustained analysis of Saunders’s fiction, primarily exploring posthumanist ethics as they relate to nonhuman and human animal relationships in Saunders’s texts. As this study is interdisciplinary, I believe it will be useful not only for understanding Saunders’s fiction but for understanding different conceptions of posthumanist ethics and how we relate to and with nonhuman animals.

Earlier, I compared David Foster Wallace’s writing with that of Saunders. Likewise, John C. Hawkins’s Liberty University Master’s thesis, Life Inside the Spectacle: David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, and Storytelling in the Age of Entertainment (2013), offers an insightful reading of and commentary on Saunders’s In Persuasion Nation alongside Infinite Jest