First Place

By Gabe Durham

The protagonist dies in the following George Saunders stories: “Civilwarland in Bad Decline,” “CommComm,” “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” “The End of FIRPO in the World” and that one about the boy and his pet dinosaur. Other Saunders titles include the words “downtrodden,” “unhappiness,” “frightening” and “terror.”

I submit this as sufficient evidence that we can safely cram the entirety of Saunders’ fiction into the genre of “tragedy.”
Before we address the author’s own essay prompt, we must first examine the question, “Is tragedy ever valuable?”

Answer: Of course not.

Tragedy is dead to modern Americans. That doesn’t mean that we can’t occasionally praise Shakespeare for killing off Hamlet and the gang. The indecisive prince was getting a little wordy for his own good and, besides, we’re 400 years removed from the whole event and Hamlet, Claudius and Laertes would have been long since dead even if they had resolved their silly Victorian differences and died of old age.

“But, but,” you stammer, “What about the value of tragedy as a vehicle for Aristotelian catharsis?” Well, first of all, you’re just saying that so that we all know that you’ve read Aristotle. Congrats, professor. But catharsis is an archaic myth, like bloodletting. People who claim to need emotional release are probably painters and women, and to encourage this sort of behavior is to discourage the use of the mind.

Furthermore, I don’t need to remind you that our country needs to stay positive. Americans and Iraqis are dying everyday, immigrants are rioting in the streets and gas prices are forcing me to seriously consider applying for a job. There’s enough real-world tragedy to make me downright mopey if I allowed myself think about it.

But I won’t. Now Is the Time for Me to Win.

Just as churches, during the Depression, wrote nothing but upbeat songs like “Mansion Over the Hilltop,” “Raise Your Hands, Sell Your Car” and “Heaven’s Paved With Gold (And I Haven’t Been Able to Look My Kids In the Face Since I Lost My Job),” we too need to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and think us some happy thoughts.

This guy George Saunders keeps trying to bring me down being all vexing and dystopic, trying to take a big dump in my oatmeal, but he’s got another thing coming. If I stop and think about sad barbers, sad fake cavemen, or sad Inner Hornerites, I may start thinking about the girls that didn’t love me back (and made me sad) and my parents’ sad divorce. This is not an option.

So. “Is there a more hopeful message buried in this abysmal malodorous post-modern dreck?”

Maybe. I don’t know. I’m not a freaking professor like you, Mr. “Aristotelian Catharsis.” Sorry, I’m a little too busy closing big accounts and having power lunches. I don’t need to scourge the pages of short stories looking for hope when I could just drive to Best Buy, listening to “Three Little Birds” on repeat and buy some iPod accessories.

Second Place

History in Bad Decline
by Robert Kausal

At a recent family gathering, I told my sister that
my wife and I were thinking about taking our kids to
Washington D.C. for our summer vacation. We wanted
them to experience some of our country’s most famous
landmarks and museums. My sister almost choked on her
deviled egg. She set her Chianti on the table, leaned
forward, and said, “You’re kidding? Do you really
think your kids would have more fun learning the
history of Washington D.C. than visiting the Pirates
of the Caribbean?” She should know; she has been to
Disney World five times.

Not long afterward, I read George Saunders’
Pastoralia and CivilWar Land in Bad Decline. Both
collections perfectly capture how American culture is
controlled by the past. Here I thought is how my
sister would like to experience history—prepackaged,
sanitized, and fun. Check your thinking caps at the
gate and take a log ride down the Potomac with the big
splash at the Lincoln Memorial. Don’t forget to buy
your Declaration of Independence refrigerator magnet
on the way out.

George Saunders’ characters are relentlessly pursued
by history. As much as they hate it, ignore it,
recreate it, and even simulate it, their personal
histories haunt them just the same. The past is
powerful and determines much of their behavior. When
the characters in “Sea Oak” are given the possibility
of changing their futures, they still have a hard time
letting go of their past—even when it means the death
of a child! But isn’t this how people really are? It
may not be pretty, but for me, this recognition of our
follies is what makes us human.

American culture teaches us to look away rather than
look at people who are different. Mr. Saunders’
characters come right at you—fat, ugly, stupid,
hypocritical, and vice ridden. And boy, are they
beautiful! In “The Barber’s Unhappiness,” every
character is so masterfully painted that you can’t
help but laugh. When the narrator says about Mickey,
“in spite of what Ann DeMann had once said about him
being a bad screw, it had gotten hard quick last night
and stayed hard throughout the kissing, and as far as
being queer, that was laughable, he wished that Uncle
Edgar could have seen that big boner.” Brilliant! I
laughed out loud while reading that on the train.

At the same time, Saunders shows us that humanity is
not doomed. We can sometimes even surprise ourselves.
In “The Falls” the character Morse “kicked off his
loafers and threw his long ugly body across the
water.” His characters persevere despite their past
circumstances. What else can we do? For me, Pastoralia
is one of the funniest satires of all time.

But for some people—those poor souls who don’t
realize that someone has crapped in their oatmeal—Mr.
Saunders’ stories are dismissed for being dark and
cynical. His characters have no redeeming values and
don’t deserve the ink that’s wasted on them. These are
the same people who wanted to change the size of
Barbie’s breasts, who banned their employees from
saying Merry Christmas, and who don’t want to see
interracial couples in textbooks. Unfortunately, they
are a majority in this country. And unfortunately,
they are more interested in being anesthetized than
having their beliefs challenged. Ah “sweet
homogeneity.”

But fortunately, George Saunders is writing some
scathing, dark, cynical, and depressing humor! For
this reason I have nothing but hope—hope that George
Saunders can keep me thinking and laughing. He is not
a pessimist; he is an “optometrist.”

As for where we will spend our summer vacation, we
have decided on going to Mt. Olympus Water & Theme
Park in Wisconsin. They have a new roller coaster
called Hades!

Third Place

By Christopher Perkins

My first encounter with the work of George Saunders (henceforth referred to as The Man) came about several years ago in a freshman Creative Writing class at a little University in Central Texas. The Man had agreed to do a reading there and, the day before he appeared at our University, our class was handed photocopies (produced, I am sure, without permission) of “Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz.” It was an important moment in my education as a writer. It was the first time that I realized I was far, far away from being a writer myself.

When I got home that night, after reading the story, I immediately set fire to it. Normally, I’m not in the habit of burning literature, but, it was a frightfully cold night and money was tight and the slight flame kept me warm for a few minutes. It was the first, though certainly not the last, time that The Man’s words brought me comfort in a moment of need.

A few years later I found a copy of Pastoralia in a discount bin at a used bookstore and, recognizing The Man’s name without remembering why, I bought it and began reading. I read it quickly, unable to stop. I laughed uncontrollably at images of Professional Neanderthals and their children and the demented notions behind “inadvertent” substance abuse, or “Penile Simulators,” or the entire first section of “The Barber’s Unhappiness” which is, arguably, the best bit of writing in the English language since The Pardoner’s Tale in the late fourteenth century.

But the question, as posed by The Man himself, goes beyond my own silly experiences with his work. How can we justify The Man against charges of being “dystopic,” “dark,” “depressing,” and, I’m sure, other words that begin with the letter d?

It seems to me to be more a question of the critics’ taste than of the quality of The Man’s work, but, as money is still tight and I would very much enjoy a free copy of In Persuasion Nation so that I can spend that twenty bucks elsewhere (lapdances and margaritas mostly), I will attempt to answer it. I have already made a rather vague comparison between The Man and Geoffrey Chaucer (the author formerly known as The Man and henceforth referred to as The Wight) and, although I feel certain that there are several Chaucerian scholars and other assorted Medievalists who would insist that I be drawn and quartered for doing so, I cannot help but wonder if, perhaps, this is a justifiable comparison.

In The Wight’s work we find a certain disdain for existence as it was then. Take for example the disgusting depiction of the young boy in The Prioress’s Tale whose throat is cut and his body irrevently discarded because of his Christianity, or, the heroes of the aforementioned Pardoner’s Tale whose vengeful search for Death leads to their own demise at each other’s hands (PriT line 570, ParT lines 893-4). Certainly these tales of Medieval life can be seen as “bleak,” “depressing,” etc., and yet they survive as important works of literature, worthy of study even now, seven centuries after their creation.

A certain professor of mine has suggested that The Wight was willing to sacrifice his characters for the sake of satire, that his ideas were more important than the people who embodied them. If The Wight is, as I believe, the father of satire in the English language, then The Man is his offspring in its perfect form. He (The Man, Mr. Saunders) is able to satirize modern existence, in all its disgusting glory, without sacrificing his characters at the altar of political/social commentary. Truly, these unnamed critics of The Man’s work find it “depressing” and whatnot because they find themselves caring so much about the characters within it that the idea of their (the character’s) suffering is painful to them (the critics).

And who can blame them? Who in this century does not empathize with the narrator of “Pastoralia’s” hopeless devotion to his dead-end job and his unwavering desire to care for his family in whatever way possible, or Mickey’s (the barber in “The Barber’s Unhappiness”) prurient desires and fascination with daydreaming himself into better situations than his own? These, and others in The Man’s work, are the daily sufferings of Modern life in an overpopulated and underpaid world just as brutal murder, plague, and corruption were accepted aspects of Medieval life.

The true measure of an artist, in any medium, is not his/her ability to please, but, rather, his/her ability to define the drama of existence in his/her time. In this, both The Wight and The Man are successful in their literature. But it is The Man we are focused on. His (Mr. Saunders’) stories provide a glimpse into an all-too-familiar world while still allowing the natural humor of humanity to not only make us laugh, but to make us cry, sigh, and wonder at what it is that makes us human. In essence, The Man’s work is a modern exploration of the Boethian idea (on which most, if not all, of The Wight’s satire is based) that bad things happen, and often they happen to decent people, but, like the flame of a photocopied page on a cold night, his stories comfort us by assuring that, despite our suffering, we can, and will, survive.