Talking Big

Plot spoilers here.

Some notes on the structure of this story.

“Liberation Day” is the title story of Liberation Day, a new collection of nine short stories by American author George Saunders. At 60 pages long, it’s about 25% of the book and twice as long as any of the other pieces in the collection. It brings back themes and topics of some of Saunders’ strongest work of the past, stories like “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” and “The Semplica Girl Diaries.” The narration moves (sometimes smoothly, other times abruptly) in and out of at least six levels of story (maybe seven), and one way to attack a reading might be to track these.

Top Level – Main Story Situation

The exposition for the main stage of the story is radically indirect. Slowly, we learn the situation of the narrator Jeremy and two other people (all three are known as Speakers) who have been seemingly enslaved by Mr. Untermeyer in his home. They’ve been plugged in by the backs of their necks/skulls to a Podium that allows a Pulse of information to flow into them and also inspire them to Speak, to tell stories selected by Mr. U for his audience of friends. We never learn much about the world outside the house. It’s likely America and in our near future. How this situation could be known outside the privacy of the Untermeyer home and allowed by law is not explained. There are groups opposed to this enslavement. The Speakers have undergone a procedure that has eradicated their memories. They are not aware they are enslaved.

The Stories of the Speakers

The Pulse sent by Mr. U to his Speakers not only allows them to tell the stories, but they inhabit them as well. They (in some sense) become the characters they portray. It’s not unlike how a method actor lives in a character, or how a reader becomes engrossed in a book, but it can be suddenly ended when the Pulse is turned off.

Mrs. Untermeyer’s erotic enjoyment of Jeremy

Mrs. U sneaks at night into the Listening Room where Jeremy and the other Speakers are “stored” when they are not Speaking. She turns him on (in both senses), feeds him a Pulse, and both of them inhabit the romantic story he Speaks. He as he Speaks it, she as she hears it.

Story Inside the Story

There is a story inside the larger narrative of General Custer’s doomed last stand as told by the Speakers. Jeremy tells the story of a Captain Evers of Minnesota who writes an imaginary letter (or imagines that he writes a letter, or he writes it in his head) to his wife as he is stranded on the battlefield. The Captain detaches from the horror around himself and tells the story of his love for his wife. Jeremy becomes the Captain and Mrs. U the wife (as he whispers to her).

Dreams of the Speakers/Singers

After Mr. U leads the Speakers (and also a group of Singers who are similarly enslaved and sing parts of the narratives) through an intense rehearsal of a narrative of the events of June 12, 1876, (the Custer story), he abruptly quits, turns off the light and leaves the room. The Speakers and Singers just as suddenly become themselves again, but next they dream of their roles, their other inhabited selves. What is strange in the description below, is that Jeremy says they dream of a room-sized scale model of the battlefield, not the battle itself.

What we know, what we retain of what we just now knew, floats about in our heads like the dust we made as we rode. In dreams that soon come, we are Lakota, Arapaho, whites, Cheyenne, Crow, moving freely about a room-sized scale model of the battlefield, shouting jokes, racing our mounts, suddenly friends, having forgotten entirely that just now, in the daylight, we desired to obliterate one another.

The Hints of The Eradicated Past Lives of the Speakers

The would-be liberators who break into the Listening Room during the final performance by the Speakers and Singers carry with them a notebook that has information about the lives of the Speakers before memory eradication. Details spill out in the hectic moments of the attempted liberation. “Hector,” she says, “Wife Danielle. No kids. Unemployed for seven years. Three poodles: Rudy, Phipps, Esmerelda II.” The reveals spark recognition in the Speakers. The sense they are where they belong (i.e. in the Listening Room) evaporates.

Crossing the Thresholds Between Any of the Story Levels

Leads to violence. I won’t spoilt this.

The movement between the levels refracts the historical fiction. It is hard to know if Saunders cares about his 19th century creations or if he’s a charlatan or whether the question matters. One imagines he does care. Lincoln in the Bardo is a moving novel, and in “Liberation Day” and “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” the fragments we glimpse between the moments of dark parody are weirdly sentimental.