Love Letter

An optimism post disguised as a short-story post

For a while now, I’ve been thinking over George Saunders’s short story, “Love Letter,” from the New Yorker issue of March 30, 2020. I have yet to reach any conclusions, but I do have lots of thoughts and feelings, so that’s what I’m going to share today.

[One-sentence summary: “Love Letter” takes the form of a letter from a grandfather to his grandson, written under an oppressive political regime, simultaneously urging the grandson not to get involved in a friend’s political problems, and attempting to justify his own lack of political initiative, in an ambivalent way that leaves the reader to wonder whether, at the end of the story, the grandfather will help the grandson’s friend.]

This story filled me with a lot of feelings—some admiring, others negative—which have intensified since the election. I can’t tell if the negative ones are a sign that the story is “working” on me, or if they’re a sign of some… not “dissatisfaction,” exactly, but something that I personally want to do differently. (I have come to realize that a certain visceral annoyed feeling, about a text I otherwise admire, is often the flip side of an Exciting Discovery about something I want to do differently in writing.)

In August, David Sedaris read and discussed “Love Letter” on the New Yorker fiction podcast. He starts by comparing the story to “The Lottery,” as a work of art that makes us look at ourselves in a new way, and accomplishes something beyond what can be accomplished by a meme of Trump’s head on a pig’s body. I hadn’t thought about “The Lottery” in a minute, but as soon as he mentioned it, I thought it was a good comparison—and I remembered, too, that I felt a lot of resistance to “The Lottery” when I read it for the first time in, like, middle school.

When I try now to identify what I didn’t appreciate… I think it was the gap between the tone and the content: an outrageous atrocity, narrated like an ordinary occurrence (“The lottery was conducted—as were the square dances, the teen-age club, the Halloween program—by Mr. Summers…”). This disjuncture is (obviously) the point; it’s supposed to make us realize, or re-cognize, all the outrageous atrocities that we take for granted in our daily lives. A noble project… yet something about it struck me, I think, as performative and grandstanding, somehow of a piece with a lot of middle school. It felt like being at a play about a witch hunt and everyone is shouting “Who is to blame” and then they turn on the house lights to demonstrate that “We are all to blame,” or “Society is to blame”—but the adult actors somehow aren’t to blame, because they are the gadflies pointing out to us our own hypocrisy—which I really didn’t appreciate when I was in middle school, especially after I had politely sat through them doing their thing for an hour.

Now that I am myself an adult, and other people often politely sit through me doing my thing for an hour (thanks, guys), this kind of art works better on me. I remember being moved by A. M. Homes reading “The Lottery” on the New Yorker podcast, also in 2020, and in terms of technique, there is a lot I admire about both “The Lottery” and “Love Letter”—especially how they start in medias res, and there’s no up-front exposition, and all the background information just creepily emerges. But there’s also something I find myself resisting or questioning.

There’s one passage in “Love Letter” that I keep thinking about—the one with the memorable image that rhymes with “Trump.” (It’s long, so I’m breaking it up and putting my thoughts in between.)

It did not seem (and please destroy this letter after you have read it) that someone so clownish could disrupt something so noble and time-tested and seemingly strong, that had been with us literally every day of our lives. We had taken, in other words, a profound gift for granted. Did not know the gift was a fluke, a chimera, a wonderful accident of consensus and mutual understanding...

Already here I find myself balking a bit at the “noble” and “profound gift”—is that the U. S. Constitution, or democracy itself? I’m pro-constitution and all, but it feels painful and inaccurate to think of it as a miraculous perfect document that came into the earth by magic, but has now been exploited and defiled because we didn’t honor it enough. I think of it more as a valuable thought product of the Enlightenment—one that is currently two centuries into a long, unavoidably painful process of updating. Not to downplay how amazing (and noble and profound) it was that Enlightenment people were able to imagine and formulate the rules for social equality… but they weren’t historically capable of seeing and embracing the implications of their own idea, specifically, how the equality would have to apply to everyone (women, colonial subjects, perhaps someday animals, AIs, extraterrestrial beings, and/ or other entities we can’t yet see and embrace). So, already from the beginning, a long historical struggle was built into those documents. That’s why it doesn’t feel to me like we’re backsliding now (as I know it feels to many people…), but that we’re continuing to work through our blind spots. I think we can be happy that the generally accepted bounds of personhood have expanded greatly—if not, perhaps, as greatly or universally as some people thought in 1787, or 1992, or 2008.

Returning to the quote…

Because this destruction was emanating from such an inept source, who seemed (at that time) merely comically thuggish, who seemed to know so little about what he was disrupting, and because life was going on, and because every day he/they burst through some new gate of propriety, we soon found that no genuine outrage was available to us anymore.

It occurs to me that maybe this is my problem: “genuine outrage.” I’m not into it. It feels wasteful. Instead of being outraged at outrageous atrocities, isn’t it more efficient to be curious—to understand how they happened?

Come to think of it, I’m also not a huge fan of “propriety.” As a way of regulating dinner party behavior, it feels way less appealing than “thoughtfulness,” “empathy,” or “hygiene.” Maybe it’s a question of how you view politeness: is it a matter of following protocols (and being outraged when other people don’t follow), or is it a matter of “imagining what it’s like to experience yourself, as someone who is not you”?

Now I think “outrage” and “propriety” are part of the shame-honor worldview, which I really do have no use for. I don’t think it’s accurate to say that Trump “has no shame”; he seems more to me like the pure product of a certain kind of shame-honor upbringing, where you end up having to deflect shame at all costs, because you believe it’s real—you believe that the one who is shamed is really bad and undeserving of love, so all you care about is making sure that the shame falls on somebody else.

If you’ll allow me a crude metaphor (as I’m sure you, the King of las Bromas de Fartos, will): a guy comes into a dinner party, takes a dump on the rug in the living room. The guests get all excited, yell in protest. He takes a second dump. The guests feel, Well, yelling didn’t help. (While some of them applaud his audacity.) He takes a third dump, on the table, and still no one throws him out. At that point, the sky has become the limit in terms of future dumps.

That’s it, the sticky line: “The sky has become the limit in terms of future dumps.” David Sedaris mentions it in the podcast, in the context of being unable now to follow the news the same way he did in 2016—no longer having the energy to read about every insane thing That Man says and does. This observation, in combination with the “future dumps” line, was really getting in my head on the day after the election, causing me a lot of negative thoughts.

The negative thoughts had started, as often happens, with a positive thought: viz. that the awful news of November 6, 2024, felt, to me, less awful than I had expected; less awful than the same news in 2016, when I was unable to leave the house for a day. I did not feel tempted to cancel the somewhat arduous dental work I had scheduled for Wednesday morning (thank you, paid subscribers!), to repair damage related to tooth-grinding, a phenomenon I don’t expect to lessen in the next four years (wear your mouthguards, people!) (Saunders’s narrator: also clearly a grinder). I felt warmly towards everyone I interacted with, on the subway, at the dentist’s office, at the coffee shop where I got myself a restorative Americano and was doing experiments to see if you can still taste if your tongue is numb; and then later while I was running errands—including at a hospital pharmacy and a FedEx, where a couple of things didn’t go the way I wanted, and different people had to explain to me various annoying aspects of bureaucracy/ the human condition, which I felt they did with some extra level of warmth and consideration.

Then there was a voice in my mind like, “This is the second dump on the rug, and by not being upset and glued to the news, you’re now a stooge to dictatorship.” Relatedly: “Of course it’s easy for you to have a good day, buying espresso drinks and ‘enjoying’ the benefits of health care; of course people are being nice to you, how much money did you spend today, what about undocumented trans kids.” And: “What if this is Germany in 1933.”

I guess this isn’t directly related to the Saunders story anymore, but maybe the main thing I want to say today is that I think it’s both physiologically and politically very important not to second-guess one’s moments of optimism, or of good feelings towards other people, both of which are key to anyone actually managing to improve anything. And the invocations of the Third Reich, Stalin, and the most vulnerable people of the past and present… they can be useful, but they can also end up cowing everyone else into silence at the unspeakable magnitude of the real victims’ suffering, and that’s just the shame again.

Looking back at the story of the guy at the dinner party, maybe there are different ways to interpret it. There’s a pessimistic interpretation: “We’re only capable of feeling true outrage once; at each successive outrage, we get more and more inured, evil is normalized, and the restoration of just order grows less and less likely.” But another way to look at it is that the first outrage is such a shock that it prevents a reasoned response; (some) people’s bandwidth is taken up 100% by thoughts like, “This is not allowed to happen in the story.” That’s how I felt in 2016—like it just couldn’t be real, and I secretly even sent $20 to Jill Stein, like a dummy.

But if you think about some of the positive political action that came after 2016, like #MeToo or the George Floyd protests… those things weren’t the product, let’s say, of the first dump on the rug. #MeToo meant the same thing happening, in private, literally millions of times, until people were able to collect themselves, compare notes, and recognize that the situation was both wrong and avoidable—like, it’s not a mandatory part of going to a dinner party (adding to the rich human tapestry of how dinner parties are full of ups and downs, O Fortuna).

I wanted to mention also that Saunders has a short piece in the current New Yorker called “Five Thought Experiments,” which involves reframing the political discourse as a kind of performance art engineered to make people angry (anger being “let’s face it, a big money-maker”)—one implication being it’s not paving the way to fascism to not follow all of the news the same way you did in 2016, since much of the news is literally engineered (by the “invisible hand”) to make people crazy. By the way, I can’t totally imagine these “thought experiments” being formulated in this way in 2016; there’s a level of dispassionate reflection that feels more advanced to me. Which is all to say: I don’t think we’re back where we were before. We learned a lot, and we’re going to learn a lot more.

Because this is basically an optimism post disguised as a short story post: one thing that made 2024 feel different to me from 2016, is that I now belong to a union. Barnard contingent faculty belong to UAW Local 2110 (literally part of United Auto Workers)… so this fall I started getting emails about bus trips to do door-knocking in swing districts, which is something I always wanted to do, but I would never have managed it if someone hadn’t directly emailed me about where to get on the bus. So OK look, I didn’t become a labor movement figurehead overnight, but I did make it on one canvassing trip to Allentown, PA, and this already felt hugely meaningful. I was so inspired by the level of organization, competence, and energy—and after having these nebulous “swing districts” looming in one’s head, what a relief to go there and be reminded that the people there are actual people, no more or less enigmatic than other people, and as rewarding of the spirit of inquiry. I remember one porch had a series of particularly serene-looking Buddha statues, identical in shape but differently colored—and I immediately started to make various “political” generalizations based on the presence of all these Buddhas—and then right next to the door I came across a waist-high figure of an anthropomorphic dog dressed in a police officer uniform, with handcuffs dangling from its belt—and I felt some kind of surrender, like, “Oh right, this is reality”—and it felt like it was actually repairing some part of my brain that had been damaged from the internet. (I told this story on the bus home, and another canvasser mentioned a house with a sign that said “God Bless This Home”—and another that said “Clothing Optional”: “I wasn’t sure who was going to come to the door.”)

[Side note: why is it so hard to get AI to show me a dog dressed as a police officer, arm-in-arm with three multi-colored Buddhas?]

[End side note]

I won’t say it was an unadulterated wonderful time—it didn’t feel great to be bussed in from out-of-state to badger people who had already been badgered half to death; sometimes you would open a storm door and about two pounds of political leaflets would fall on your feet, and a few people had even ripped out their doorbells. But… we did rescue two mail-in ballots that were going to be late if the voters didn’t drop them off in person, and I learned how to use the canvassing app, and it was incredible to meet volunteers and workers from so many different branches and unions and workplaces—it filled me with the resolution, going forward, to shift my attention (such as it is) to local politics—and also to being as pleasant (and un-butthurt) as I can be in interpersonal life—i.e., to being as open as possible to love.

That is the end of this love letter.

Below, as a special bonus for paid subscribers, I am including some outtakes about the Saunders story: how I came to it at this particular time, how it relates to Bakhtin’s idea of dialogism, and whether short stories are less dialogic than novels... PLUS the text of a short speech I gave a couple weeks ago at the Words Without Borders gala.

Thank you for reading!