“Oomph-Making Machines”: An Interview with George Saunders

Abstract

“Oomph-Making Machines”:An Interview with George Saunders Alexander Weinstein (bio) Alexander Weinstein: In your story “Victory Lap” Alison asks “Can goodness win? Or do good people always get shafted, evil being more reckless?” As a writer who addresses humanity’s future, what are your thoughts on our human future? Can goodness win? George Saunders: I think it wins all the time. Also, of course, it loses all the time. I like stories that are situated at that place where a character is deciding whether good (within him or outside of him) will win. My sense is that our future will be a lot like our past, with different window-dressing. People will (always) struggle with what I take to be the fundamental cruelties of this life: we feel infinite but are finite; we love, but both we and the things we love are temporary; we want to be permanently happy but whatever happiness we achieve turns out, alas, to be fleeting. AW: In the same story, there’s a heartbreaking moment where a pretty awful, near-totalitarian father explains to his son that they have so many rules for him because, “You’re literally all we have.” In that moment, there’s real compassion for the vulnerability of the father. Many of your stories have similarly “awful” characters that end up revealing their hearts and so gain our compassion. Can you talk a bit about the role of compassion/forgiveness in your work? GS: Well, I think a feeling of compassion in a work of fiction stems, ultimately, from a desire that no part of your text be flat, if you see what I mean. You are always trying to surprise and delight your reader—and so revision can be seen as a ritual way of scanning your text for moments of laziness or autopilot. That dad had presented as “awful” and “near-totalitarian” for most of the story, and part of me, as I remember it, noticing that, felt: “That right there is a failure of escalation—that father has been hitting the same drum for the reader since his introduction…what else might there be to him?” So what starts out as a technical concern becomes a moral-ethical one. He’s more interesting with that additional side to him. Which, in turn, adds a little oomph to the story. And at the end of the day, in my view, a story is an oomph-making machine, or it’s nothing at all. AW: I’ve never heard stories described as oomph-making machines! Can you say more about this? GS: Well, for me, at the end of the day, that’s one thing I am relatively sure about vis-à-vis a work of art: it has to make oomph. Or: be powerful. Or: generate energy. Or: undeniably engage the viewer. Otherwise, why bother? All of the salutary effects we attribute to art are dependent on some invented thing being accepted, by the viewer/reader, as “real.” And this “oomph” thing has something to do with that, too—a story with that quality stops being words on a page and becomes something more. AW: There’s often a difference between the dystopian worlds we create in our fiction and the actual joy we experience in our personal lives. Yet writing happier stories which center on gratitude/joy/awe is challenging. Is such a story possible without sacrificing social critique? [End Page 66] GS: No, I think a story that authentically represented joy or gratitude would be every bit as capable of social critique as a misery-fest. Those stories are harder, I think. I’m not sure why—they seem to take more maturity as a person and more confidence as a writer. But of course, stories are what we might call co-arising systems: for a story to show joy, it would have to have some anti-joy presence in it—something that would normally, in real life, impede joy. Otherwise we’ll feel it as a set-up. Conversely, if we read a dystopian story in which there’s no joyful presence in it (nothing that would, in real life, produce joy) we would (or...