Jeremy is a Speaker, his memory has been erased and he speaks for his lords in some kind of strange spectacles based on the words of these enslaved and robotic humans. He prepares for the big Performance, which will be based on the Battle of Big Horn, General Custer’s great defeat. This is the dystopian backbone of the first story of Liberation Day (Seix Barral/Edicions de 1984, with translation respectively by Javier Calvo and Yannick Garcia), the new book by George Saunders (Amarillo, Texas, 1958), considered the great author of the current American short story.
The nine stories in the book, some more fantastic and others more realistic, share the same strangeness. How do you decide whether to shoot one way or the other?
I confess that I don’t do any planning before writing, and only do 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 idea, I finish all the stories I started, I type and type and I suppose that the subconscious helps me finish them, until they seem perfect to me.
Do you work with the idea of ??the book in your head or do you go story by story?
Wow, 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 good and I move forward, and little by little it grows. If I go through the first two pages and completely believe them, 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, changes and advances according to the reality that surrounds her. It’s you writing!
Yes, it’s me, although if I have an idea, I write a sentence and take it from there. Not her, it seems silly to her and she simply changes and moves forward. I don’t do that thing of thinking that it is nonsense, but that the subconscious has brought it out and I give it time. I have a tendency, especially when I was younger, to worry about how I will finish it, but over the years I have learned that almost any crap that comes out of your head, if you work on it, you can improve it, and if it improves it is no longer crap. , just dirt, and if you keep working there may be a little gold, but you have to have patience and also trust that your subconscious is ahead. It’s slower, that’s for sure.
Thus, a good story could emerge from the beginnings of the narrative that his character rejects.
Look, the first section of that story came from another story published years ago where there is a little boy who falls into a pond and there was a scene with the mother at home worried, but the scene was not needed and I took it out and put it away. Sometimes I go to that file and look to see if there is anything funny, and I took out this piece and gave it independence, a story of its own to live, I put it at the beginning and the story grew around it. I can almost hear the scene thanking me for having taken it out of that story to which it didn’t really belong.
The idea of ??punishment is constant throughout the book…
Yes Yes. I was raised Catholic, so we were constantly making mistakes and would have to be punished. When I write I don’t think much about the themes, 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 for there to be a change?
If you know where you’re going, isn’t it funny anymore?
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 is confusing, there are contradictions and ambiguities. I’m a big fan of Chekhov, and he always makes you suspend judgment in a way that I don’t do in real life, I’m very political and very critical, but a narrative makes you realize how quickly you normally judge.
There is a lot of politics in the book.
Yes, partly because I wrote it during Trump’s term. At the same time, if a story agrees with what I think politically it worries me, because I think it is not enough, but I am not the most subtle writer, and sometimes I take my daily political ideology and put it in a distorted mirror. .
At the end of the stories the reader finds some characters who are not doing well at all, but not completely bad either, there is a wall that we hit again and again, a feeling like being lost… a bit like the world.
There comes a moment in the story where you can move the story toward a positive outcome, and every time it came, it seemed like he was pretending, like he was denying what had just happened. It’s not that I think the world sucks and I’ll 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 that’s how it is, or if we get into trouble and the only way to get out of it is to think differently. .
Plant a revolutionary seed that we don’t know if it will germinate or not…
Yes, this is the beauty of stories, that you can explain them and then you will see if they go in one direction or another. But another thing that I really believe in is that even if I tell you a very sad story, if I make you laugh while I explain it to you, or even if we just feel united while you are reading it, with my arm on your shoulder, that is very positive, it is the most positive, and whether in the end the couple gets married 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 big braggart who hides behind a flag,” those are two different things. I’m from a working-class background, and when I was young I remember being very passionate and very inarticulate, talking a lot, and in a hurry, but as I got older I started to read more and I started to be, I think, a little more articulate, and I actually 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 registers, to be able to play with confusion or precision is present in my literature. Someone told me that everyone is Buddha until he starts speaking.
In this 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 calm, but when we start talking everything gets tangled up, and it’s wonderful for literature. The other side is when we use the usual language for convenience, because today it masks reality, which is very complex and multitonal. 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 not forget that we know nothing, that we control nothing and life will bite us in the ass.
But you have to keep fighting, right?
Yes, it’s another way to celebrate, or to be positive: this life sucks, 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 the voice of each character the most difficult thing?
No, it’s the easiest 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 this voice and I’m done. will tell what will happen.
Catalan version, here
