Sunday, May 15, 2022

Your involvement will not help: "Love Letter" by George Saunders, Best American Short Stories 2021

Paula Fox said that a story begins with a small question and ends with a bigger one. Some theorists of narrative feel that "theme" in fiction isn't really about an answer, but about phrasing the problem in a powerful and novel way. That's certainly how the logic of "Love Letter" by George Saunders operates. The premise of the story sounds like something I would hate. It's a grandfather in the late 2020s writing a letter to his grandson. The grandfather begins trying to answer specific questions the grandson has asked about three people the grandson wants to help, but ends by trying to answer a bigger question: why didn't he do more before the 2020 election to prevent an eventual Trump-initiated dictatorship in America? 

The story was originally published in The New Yorker in April 2020, about six months before the 2020 presidential election. It sounds like the kind of story you'd read in a creative writing 101 class, something a zealous, middle-class liberal would have written after getting their "writing prompt" from social media. "How will you answer your children when they ask you what you did when the world was in trouble?" was a pretty typical meme in 2020. It still is now.

Saunders manages to somehow make it not bathetic and painful to read, mostly by focusing not too much on the political aspects of the future, but on the human aspects of the family to which the grandfather and grandson both belong. The grandfather is keenly aware of beauty in life, the geese flying overhead and the grandson's generosity toward his sister. Normally, a keen sense of beauty and a belief that the small experience of beauty is what matters most in life is a good thing. But grandpa didn't live in ordinary times. 

It's a disservice to the story to take what was made into a very human narrative and dissect it back into its bare facts, but I'm going to do it anyway. I know Wordsworth warned that "we murder to dissect," but I'm hoping I can break this down in order to learn more about how it works, then put it back together still living, but with a greater understanding of how its biological processes work. 

A letter received and questions asked


Grandpa has gotten a letter from his grandson Robbie. Robbie has asked three things. First, what should he do about his friends, whom Grandpa, for security reasons, calls only G and M. (Monitoring of citizen communications has become prevalent in the near future.) G is in the United States illegally, and although M is here legally, she knew about G's being here illegally and did not report G. Second, Robbie has asked what to do about his friend J, who seems to be in prison for some kind of political objection to the current administration. Third, Robbie has asked what Grandpa and Grandma were doing in 2020, back before everything went to shit. Why didn't they do more to stop the U.S. from sliding into this state? We don't see Robbie's letter. We have to infer what it said from Grandpa's reply. Grandpa has written his letter by hand, because he thinks it might be less likely to be intercepted by the government that way. 

Grandpa's replies, simplified


Relative to the first two questions, Grandpa believes Robbie should be pragmatic and not get involved. He qualifies this belief by saying he understands why Robbie would feel he ought to get involved and that he isn't saying Robbie should "stick his head in the sand." But if Robbie does get involved, it won't do any good, and Robbie will end up being hassled by the same people who are harassing his friends. Moreover, some of the repercussions might rebound onto Robbie's family. In sum, Grandpa feels that "Wisdom, now, amounts to making such intelligence accommodations as we can." 

Grandpa does understand how difficult it will be for a caring person like Robbie to do nothing, and he hints that, if the worst happens, he and Grandma might be willing to use the money they have saved to help Robbie help J. But that would not be Grandpa's first choice. 

Grandpa's answer to the third, much bigger question, is more complicated, but I think anyone who's been at a loss to understand American socio-political developments since 2015 as much as I've been will find it understandable. In fact, it's a very good explanation of the dilemma many sensible people feel, meaning Saunders succeeded thematically, if the point of theme is to present the question well. 

Like a lot of sensible people, Grandpa and Grandma DID object to the rise of Trump. They voted against him. They wrote members of Congress. They would have gone to a march, but nobody organized one, and Grandpa was busy with work and dental conditions that prevented him from organizing anything. Grandpa did write a couple of letters to the editor after the 2020 election, but eventually, he got a warning from the police to knock it off. Anyhow--and this is the much bigger point--the letters didn't do any good, anyway. "Those who agreed with me agreed with me; those who did not remained unpersuaded." Isn't that the real predicament we're in now? Somehow, the Internet, with its access to practically all the information anywhere from all human history, seems to have made humans more closed-minded than they were before. No wonder those who opposed Trump "soon grew weary of hearing ourselves saying those things and, to avoid being old people emptily repeating ourselves, stopped saying those things." 

Well, that's the whole rub, isn't it? We who have opposed not only Trump but the whole angry babble of political incoherence in which he arose have been nothing if not baffled. We've made our arguments. We think we're right. Nobody has changed their minds. What to do?

Two questions Grandpa's reply leaves us with


Grandpa excuses himself for not having done more in 2020. It all caught him by surprise. The overthrow of democracy didn't look like what he'd expected it to look like based on history. To have had any chance of stopping it at all, he and Grandma "would have had to be more extreme people than we were, during that critical period....And our lives had prepared us for extremity, to mobilize or to be as focused and energized as I can see, in retrospect, we would have needed to be. We were not prepared to drop everything in defense of a system that was, to us, like oxygen: used constantly, never noticed." 

It's easy for most of the people who were probably reading The New Yorker in April 2020 to see themselves in that description. When Grandpa asks Robbie, "What would you have had me do? What would you have done?" most of us probably don't know the answer, either. 

Given when the story appeared, the primary question it was asking its reader was what responsibility they had to act prior to the 2020 presidential election. For me, now reading this story as part of Best American Short Stories more than six months after the anthology was published in late 2021, I can look at that election as history. Trump showed himself more willing than I even believed to jettison laws to achieve his aims, but he was stopped. He was stopped, in part, by people who had enabled him while he was in office, like Mike Pence and William Barr. To me, that refusal of key figures in his circle to collaborate with him was at least somewhat reassuring that the system hasn't collapsed yet. We now have a whole other set of issues to worry about here a year and a half after that election, some of which include good, old-fashioned threats from without. 

Was Saunders' warning in April 2020 overblown? Hard to say. It was fiction, not an editorial, so nobody in the story was telling us to do anything. In fact, Grandpa is excusing inaction. It's up to the reader to determine how wrong Grandpa is and what we should do to be different from him. Whether any of us did enough, the election is now past, leaving us only the future in which to try to make the best decisions for ourselves and the future to whom we will answer. 

Because Grandpa lives under a growing dystopia, his letter leaves us with a second moral question about what the responsibility of those living under tyranny are. 

I've been following North Korea for a good chunk of my adult life. Those who don't know much about it have a hard time understanding why the people don't rebel. They seem to think they would if put in a similar situation. But Grandpa's logic when he tells Robbie to stay out of it is the logic nearly everyone in a dictatorship follows. Grandpa isn't inhumane. He simply realizes that Robbie's "involvement will not help." It's better to try to survive, maybe even flourish, as much as the system will allow, then use your status within the system to try to bring what small succor to the suffering you can. 

The terrifying thing to me is that I don't know if Grandpa is wrong. There are some people of very strong moral makeup who believe it is everyone's responsibility to do what is right even if you know the outcome is doomed to failure. Even if you know you will be sent to a prison camp and tortured. I respect those people. I praise them. But I'm not that strong. I know how weak the human body is, how a person skilled in causing pain to it can make you do anything to make the pain stop by applying the right force to just one finger of one hand. 

Moreover, those brave enough to oppose the dictatorship tend to get purged early on, leaving few left after the early days. That's what happened in Russia after the Ukraine invasion: a weekend of protests, followed by mass acquiescence. Dictatorships were always hard to stand up to. They're much harder to stand up to now, because technology has made nearly all dictatorships competent. 

The question for us in the real timeline 


The 2020 election didn't go the way it did in "Love Letter." We still live in a society where I can talk about what an ass Trump is and nobody's going to do anything about it. If anything, it's depressing how little the world we note anything I say, how little good it will do to write a considered essay or a moving story. There's already a glut of voices, a superabundance of discourse. Smarter, more incisive voices than mine go unheeded; why should anyone listen to me? I don't need police warning me to "stay off the computer" to be discouraged from writing like Grandpa did. The lack of effect from all I've written is discouragement enough.

Dictatorships are much better to prevent than overthrow. So what's my responsibility to try to keep ourselves left of the totalitarian horizon event on the timeline? This story provides a small piece of that puzzle. Grandpa remarks at one point on how everyone failed to see what a profound and happy accident our democracy was. They "did not know the gift was a fluke, a chimera, a wonderful accident of consensus and mutual understanding." 

What we lack now, what is currently threatening to blow this gift to smithereens, is a lack of consensus and mutual understanding. I have tried to reestablish some of that through writing, but given that it seems unlikely I'll ever be widely read, I think the extent of my ability to influence the future will have to be through interpersonal contact at an individual level with other members of society. In that contact, I will need to "see things through their eyes," not, like Grandpa did, in order to gain advantages when dealing with them, but in order to build "consensus and mutual understanding." 

It's easy to talk about consensus, but one thing I think most people overlook is how hard it is to achieve. Abortion, which, if Saunders were to revisit his letter-to-the-future project, would be the letter he'd write this week, is a perfect example. About one-third of the country believes that a book written by dozens or hundreds or authors over centuries of time long before humans knew what a cell was or where the Earth was relative to the Sun tells them that abortion is a sin. That's not written in a declarative way, but they believe it's a shadow command based on what's there. How do I achieve consensus with them on abortion? I've tried, but it's not easy to do. 

Still, maybe these fault lines exploding open all over the place serve a purpose. Those who look back to the mid-20th century as a zenith of American life think the country was less divided then. It might have been, but there was also more forced unity through strict enforcement of codes of polite behavior. Those codes included things like avoiding political discussions. Maybe partly because of our long history of avoiding those discussions with our neighbors, we're not good at having those discussions now. A functional democracy is about the slow work of building trust and figuring out how to coexist with one another, how to find matters we agree on, like not wanting Russia and China to be the model for the government of the future, and work on those things. If democracy is an endless succession of "into the breach moments," a series of crises to surmount (as every election ad would have us believe), then it will never become strong. It will limp along until a crisis strong enough to topple it finally puts it out of its misery. It will be all disaster relief and no construction to prevent disaster damage in the first place. 

I don't think this is the moral of the story Saunders would have had us draw. I think Grandpa was supposed to engender a sense of urgency among readers in early 2020 by showing us the results of even a well-intentioned semi-complacency. But I have the advantage of reading the story now, and to me, the lesson is that we managed to survive that crisis, and the most important thing we can strive for is to bring the general tenor of discourse back down from a roar to a lively cocktail party discussion. I could go out and light myself on fire. I could treat every day like a last-ditch stand against what I perceive to be my political enemies. But that kind of involvement will not help. 

I realize I've kind of answered a question that Saunders' story only meant to ask, but that's the thing about how stories work. They take seed in the brains of writers, but grow in the minds of readers, and writers can't control what the native soil in readers' minds might do to the final organism. 


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