10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 m ichael b asseler The Value of Literature and the Role of the Reader in 21st-Century Fiction Listening to the Ghosts of George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo One mass-mind, united in positive intention (Lincoln in the Bardo, 254) 1 Critique/ Postcritique and the Value of (Reading) Literature after Postmodernism The value we ascribe to literature very much depends on how we conceive of the interrelation between writers, texts, and readers Literary value, therefore, must not be misunderstood as our discipline’s holy grail: It is not so much a universal, transhistorical quality inherent in ‘the literary’ (whatever this might be), 1 but subject to constant and sometimes fundamental transformations in our understanding of that dynamic constellation This constellation can be fruitfully conceived of, with Robert Meyer-Lee, as a “network comprising human and nonhuman agents,” whose complex interactions and “activities of mediation” produce and maintain literary value 2 From such vantage point, the study of literature as a discipline hinges on the very notion of literary value, or rather valuing: “to study literature means to study the acts 1 That does not necessarily mean that we cannot talk about the value of literature in broader, transhistorical terms Angela Locatelli, for instance, has argued that the value of literature resides in its “role in enlightening readers, through a specific hermeneutic activity ” See Locatelli, “Literature’s Version of its Own Transmission of Values,” Ethics in Culture: The Dissemination of Values Through Literature and Other Media, eds Astrid Erll/ Herbert Grabes/ Ansgar Nünning (Berlin/ New York: De Gruyter, 2008), 31 2 Robert Meyer-Lee, “Toward a Theory and Practice of Literary Valuing,” New Literary History 46 2 (2015), 344 278 m ichael b asseler 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 of valuing that register a text as literary, which in turn means - in one way or another - to trace mediations of literary value from one agent in the network of literary valuing through some set of other agents ” 3 Following this argument, I propose in this article to think of the value of literature not so much in terms of an (ontological, fixed) quality of literature (as suggested by the noun value), but as an activity in which value is constantly being re-generated in a network of multiple non-/ human agents, comprising writers, texts, and readers (as suggested by the continuous verb form valuing) For many decades now, the primary values and acts of valuing literature as well as other forms of art have been associated with notions of critique, contestation, suspicion, negativity, strangeness, subversion, and so forth This is part and parcel of the well-worn argument about the emergence of modernism and, later, its transformation into postmodernism under the auspices of multinational capitalism and consumer society 4 In a sense, one might say that the value of literature, in the post/ modern conception, is that it teaches us not to trust in, but always maintain a critical distance to, any form of representation, especially those that make claims to reality or ‘realism ’ Irony and metafiction, two of literary postmodernism’s hallmarks, are eventually understood as forms of critique whose purpose is to foster this particular readerly stance 5 Recently, however, post/ modernist versions of the value of literature have come under attack from various sides. In the field of literary production, postmodernism has been, if not substituted, so at least complemented with a new literature of sincerity 6 ‘New sincerity’ is one of the many terms that were suggested in the past few years to signal, if not the end of, so at least the growing discontent with the project of postmodernism, and especially the mood or attitude of ironic distance that accompanies it Preferring sincerity over irony, 3 Ibid , 351 4 See Fredric Jameson’s landmark essays “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” (1983) and “Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1984) For a detailed account of Post/ modernism as an aesthetic of the strange, see, e g , Herbert Grabes, Making Strange: Beauty, Sublimity, and the (Post)Modern ‘Third Aesthetic’ (Amsterdam/ New York: Rodopi, 2008) 5 Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1984); Lee Konstantinou, Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction (Cambridge/ London: Harvard UP, 2016), 173 6 See Jason Gladstone/ Daniel Worden, “Introduction,” Postmodern | Postwar - and After: Rethinking American Literature, eds Gladstone et al (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2016), 1; also see Michael Basseler/ Ansgar Nünning, “The American Novel in the 21st Century: Changing Contexts, Literary Developments, New Modes of Reading,” The American Novel in the 21st Century: Cultural Contexts - Literary Developments - Critical Analyses, eds eid (Trier: WVT, 2019), 19 The Value of Literature and the Role of the Reader in 21st-Century Fiction 279 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 this literature stands for a renewed attempt at speaking the truth, yet one that has learned its lessons from postmodernism and is therefore looking forward rather than backward, new rather than old, as Adam Kelly reminds us 7 While postmodernism seems to be “lapsing […] as a cultural dominant” 8 in contemporary (American) literature, we are simultaneously witnessing a certain perspective shift in the professional study of literature, and this shift likewise takes its main issue with the staples of the postmodern mindset 9 I am mainly referring here to the ‘critique/ postcritique’ debate recently launched by Bruno Latour, Rita Felski, and others For Felski, critique, and especially what she calls the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” have outlived their utility at a time when the once radical epistemological skepticism of modernism and postmodernism pervades our popular culture: “What is the use of demystifying ideology when many people no longer subscribe to coherent ideologies, when there is widespread disillusionment about the motives of politicians and public figures, when ‘everyone knows’ that hidden forces are at work making us think and behave in certain ways? ” 10 Moreover, literature - and particularly the ‘corrosive’ literature that came to characterise literary history for almost the entire 20 th century - had a substantial part in fostering the hermeneutics of suspicion “Suspicious readers are schooled by suspicious writers,” 11 Felski remarks to explain how the prevalence of critique was influenced or foreshadowed by the modernists’ preference for fragmentation, multiperspectivity, unreliable narrators, and so forth She quotes a passage from Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative to make her point: “it may be the function of the most corrosive literature to contribute to making a new kind of reader appear, a reader who is himself suspicious, because reading ceases to be a trusting voyage made in the company of a reliable narrator, becoming instead a struggle with the implied author, a struggle leading the reader back to himself ” 12 In this article I will bring together these two recent phenomena that coemerged over the past two decades: the new sincerity movement as a turn on postmodernism in literary and cultural production, and postcritical approaches in literary criticism and theory As we have already seen, both share a certain fatigue with the staples of postmodernism (such as irony, detach- 7 Adam Kelly, “The New Sincerity,” Postmodern | Postwar - and After: Rethinking American Literature, eds Jason Gladstone et al (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2016), 198 8 Peter Boxall, Twenty-First Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: CUP, 2013), 16 9 See Gladstone/ Worden, “Introduction ” 10 Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago/ London: U of Chicago P, 2015), 46 11 Ibid , 43 12 Paul Ricoeur (1988), 164; qtd in Felski, Limits of Critique, 42-43, emphasis R F ) 280 m ichael b asseler 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 ment, deconstruction, and suspicion) and strive for a replenishment and reimagining of our engagement with, or ‘uses’ of, literary expression 13 One might therefore ask in how far the new sincerity and postcritical reading constitute two occurrences of a broader aesthetic conceptualisation of, as well as ethical engagement with, literature and literary value beyond the post/ modern paradigm As Lee Konstantinou has argued in his discussion of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, the “fate of postmodernism is […] difficult to extricate from the academic humanities and social sciences as well as the recent history of institutions of higher education more generally ” 14 The central question for my article emanates from these provisional observations: If the ‘corrosive literature’ associated with modernism and postmodernism has led to the preeminence of the suspicious reader, as Ricoeur and Felski suggest, then we might ask what kind of reader is currently being produced by contemporary literature ‘after postmodernism ’ To put it the other way around: If it isn’t suspicion, what readerly stance is best suited to approach post-postmodern fiction in the 21 st century? Or, more neutral and less normative: What role does the reader play in our conceptualisation of the project of new literary-aesthetic movements such as the new sincerity? And is it legitimate to understand new sincerity and postcritical reading as two parallel instantiations of a broader aesthetic conceptualisation of the ‘uses’ and ‘value/ values’ of literature beyond the postmodern paradigm? While I will frame my argument within the debates of both of these developments or movements, my focal point will be George Saunders and his “particular brand of new sincerity ” 15 Discussing his acclaimed novel Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), I will explore Saunders’ position within the new sincerity and discuss how it might serve as a paradigm for novel forms of literary theorising that add “more comprehensive and compelling vocabularies of value” 16 to our field. First, I will briefly reconstruct the hermeneutics of suspicion underlying Rita Felski’s rejection of particular methods of literary criticism and interpretation, which are, as we have already seen, also acts of literary valuing Next, I will connect this debate to the recent discussion around new sincerity and other forms of ‘post-postmodern’ literary production, which have similarly focused on the role of the reader, or more precisely have po- 13 See Rita Felski, “Postcritical Reading,” American Book Review 38 5 (2017), 4-5 14 Konstantinou, Cool Characters, 4 15 Adam Kelly, “Language Between Lyricism and Corporatism: George Saunders’s New Sincerity,” George Saunders: Critical Essays, eds Philip Coleman/ Steve Gronert Ellerhoff (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 42 16 Felski, “Postcritical Reading,” 4 The Value of Literature and the Role of the Reader in 21st-Century Fiction 281 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 sitioned the reader as an “anchor point” 17 in a network of literary aesthetic and meaning production On this basis, my discussion of Lincoln in the Bardo serves as a case in point to show how contemporary literary fiction deploys particular formal aspects and textual strategies to evoke a certain readerly disposition, thus projecting the value of literature essentially as an activity of mediation between (the formal presentation of a) text and (its realisation through the) reader 2 Hermeneutics of Suspicion and the Role of the Reader Paul Ricoeur first coined the term “hermeneutics of suspicion” in Freud and Philosophy (1970), in which he discusses how psychoanalysis - through its strong dependence on language - is always already an interpretation, reflection, and modification of culture. 18 Regarding Freud - among Marx and Nietzsche - as one of the three masters of the “school of suspicion,” Ricoeur discusses how interpretation itself fundamentally changed from a restoration of some sacred meaning to a method for demystification. 19 Instead of mere skepticism or debunking, however, their work points toward a different kind of truth that is attached to the method of critique, which essentially constitutes an exercise of suspicion: “All three clear the horizon for a more authentic word, for a new reign of Truth, not only by means of a ‘destructive’ critique, but by the invention of an art of interpreting ” 20 This art of interpreting is wary of the nature of consciousness itself, insisting on a difference between appearance and reality: For Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, the fundamental category of consciousness is the relation hidden-shown or, if you prefer, simulated-manifested […] What all three attempted […] was to make their ‘conscious’ methods of deciphering coincide with the ‘unconscious’ work of ciphering which they attributed to the will of power, to social being, to the unconscious psychism Guile will be met by double guile 21 This short passage not only offers a pointed genealogy of the roots of the intellectual project of ‘critique,’ but in fact provides the key metaphor for what college students since the 1980s have internalised as the only acceptable method of reading (and thus: valuing) literature, i e looking for the ‘deeper’ or ‘hidden’ meanings of a text in order to lay bare its psychological, social, and 17 Meyer-Lee, “Toward a Theory,” 350 18 Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy (1965; New Haven / London: Yale UP, 1970), 4 19 Ibid , 32 20 Ibid , 33 21 Ibid , 33-34, original emphasis 282 m ichael b asseler 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 ideological implications And while the past three decades have certainly seen the rise of a number of alternative and very productive approaches beyond this sort of critique, the legacy of the hermeneutics of suspicion arguably still exerts a strong influence on how literary studies is understood and practiced today, particularly in the United States Ricoeur’s comments on the interrelation between “corrosive literature” and “suspicious readers” conjured up by Rita Felski in the above quote, however, appear in chapter 7 (“The World of the Text and the World of the Reader”) of the third volume of his magisterial Time and Narrative Against the backdrop of his tripartite model of literary mimesis laid out in volumes 1 and 2 of Time and Narrative, Ricoeur regards the question of “what, on the side of fiction, might be the counterpoint to what, on the side of history, is given as ‘real’ past ” 22 While historians construct their versions of the past in relation to some sort of lived reality of that past (what Ricoeur calls “standing-for”), literary fiction per definition doesn’t seem to allow for such referentiality. Instead, he suggests, “it is only through the mediation of reading that the literary work attains complete significance, which would be to fiction what standing-for is to history ” 23 In this respect, rhetorical elements and narrative strategies such as the unreliable narrator fulfil an important function as they break with prior conventions and readerly expectations, more or less imposing “a newly vigilant stance” 24 on the reader Against the backdrop of the three parts of mimesis, however, literary fiction is not only prefigured by existing symbolic practices and competences (mimesis I) and imaginatively configures them in terms of concrete emplotment (mimesis 2), but it also works to integrate its fictive perspective into lived experience. In the mimetic-hermeneutic cycle, this capacity or power of literary fiction constitutes its value for Ricoeur: If we admit that the cognitive value of a work lies in its power to prefigure an experience to come, then there must be no question of freezing the dialogical relation into an atemporal truth This open character of the history of effects leads us to say that every work is not only an answer provided to an earlier question but a source of new questions, in turn 25 The unreliable narrator is instructive in this context, serving as Ricoeur’s shorthand or node to describe the historical shift from trusting and passive recipient to the co-creative reader of modernist literature: 22 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol 3 (1985; Chicago: Chicago UP, 2003), 57 23 Ibid , 158 24 Felski, Limits of Critique, 43 25 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 172 The Value of Literature and the Role of the Reader in 21st-Century Fiction 283 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 The authors who most respect their readers are not the ones who gratify them in the cheapest way; they are the ones who leave a greater range to their readers to play out the contrast we have just discussed On the one hand, they reach their readers only if, first, they share with them a repertoire of what is familiar with respect to literary genre, theme, and social - even historical - context, and if, on the other hand, they practice a strategy of defamiliarizing in relation to all the norms that any reading can easily recognize and adopt […] The unreliable narrator is one element in the strategy of illusion-breaking that illusion-making requires as its antidote This strategy is one of those more apt to stimulate an active reading, a reading that permits us to say that something is happening in this game in which what is won is of the same magnitude as what is lost The balance of this gain and loss is unknown to readers; this is why they need to talk about it in order to formulate it 26 Following Meyer-Lee’s argument above, it is illuminating to reframe Ricoeur’s unreliable narrator as one particular (nonhuman) agent in the vast network of “activities of mediation” 27 that constantly perform acts of valuing As a textual strategy of the ‘corrosive literature’ meant to stimulate active reading, unreliable narrators (as well as other narrative strategies associated with post/ modern literature) provide an entry point from which the mediations of literary valuing can be traced and analysed Moreover, such a framework of literary valuing projects a kind of literary Jeopardy in which the answer begs the question: “The moment when literature attains its highest degree of efficacity is perhaps the moment when it places its readers in the position of finding a solution for which they themselves must find the appropriate questions, those that constitute the aesthetic and moral problem posed by a work ” 28 This, for Ricoeur, is exactly what the project of literary hermeneutics looks like: “Finding the question to which a text offers a reply, reconstructing the expectations of a text’s first receivers in order to restore to the text its original otherness ” 29 The value of literature resides in its capacity to change or refigure the reality against which it is pitted. For this, the (real, flesh-and-blood) reader must actualise the “role of the reader prestructured in and through the text” and thereby transform it 30 As this brief discussion of Ricoeur in the context of recent theorising about the value of literature already shows, we do not need to think of the hermeneutics of suspicion in terms of a binary opposition between critical and post- 26 Ibid , 169-170 27 Meyer-Lee, “Toward a Theory,” 344 28 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 173 29 Ibid , 174 30 Ibid , 171 284 m ichael b asseler 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 critical reading, or between depth and surface reading In fact, in Ricoeur’s parsing, the hermeneutics of suspicion, to all intents and purposes, seem particularly compatible with what Felski and others have sketched as readerly dispositions which embrace affective hermeneutic reading, treating “texts not as objects to be investigated but as cofactors that make things happen ” 31 Before I exploit this notion of literary texts as cofactors in the creation of meaning for my analysis of Lincoln in the Bardo, in the next section I will briefly turn to discussions of the new sincerity, which provide the larger background for our understanding of the multi-agential network of literary valuing in general and of Saunders’ novel in particular 3 New Sincerity, Postirony, Post-Postmodernism: “Narrative technology for fostering readerly belief” What happens if we take Ricoeur’s notion of the “role of the reader prestructured in and through the text” as our point of departure to apprehend what is happening in contemporary (American) literature beyond postmodernism? And what might be the aesthetic and moral question(s) to which this literature offers its solutions? In his pioneering work that defines the new sincerity movement in contemporary (American) literature, Adam Kelly stresses the importance of the reader for any attempt at understanding the aesthetic and ethical characteristics of this kind of literature: “What happens off the page, outside representation, depends upon the invocation and response of another; this other to whom I respond, and whose response I await, is, for many New Sincerity writers, the actual reader of their text ” 32 For writers subsumed under this category (including David Foster Wallace, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, and George Saunders, among others) sincerity can only be understood, however, as an indissoluble tension in that it always harbors the potential of (affective) manipulation - the manipulation of the other/ reader, but also the manipulation of the self This is what Kelly aptly calls the “aesthetically generative undecidability” 33 of new sincerity’s sincerity Note the fundamental shift that this entails with regard to the literary historical situatedness of new sincerity along the parameters of the post/ modern paradigm Whereas for Ricoeur modernism signaled the end of the “trusting voyage” of the reader in company of a reliable narrator, trust here returns as the central condition that enables new sincerity’s aesthetics in the first place: “That sincerity can always 31 Felski, Limits of Critique, 180 32 Kelly, “New Sincerity,” 205, emphasis M B 33 Ibid , 204 The Value of Literature and the Role of the Reader in 21st-Century Fiction 285 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 be taken for manipulation shows us that sincerity depends not on purity but on trust and faith: If I or the other could be certain that I am being sincere, the notion of sincerity would lose its normative charge ” (ibid : 201) 34 By means of this generative undecidability the reader becomes the key agent in the ethic-aesthetic project of new sincerity literature; but it is a particular kind of reader that is required, and this reader is diametrically opposed to Felski’s suspicious reader-as-detective, who would “subject a text to interrogation; diagnose its hidden anxieties; demote recognition to yet another form of misrecognition; lament our incarceration in the form of containment; read a text as a metacommentary on the undecidability of meaning; score points by showing that its categories are socially constructed; brood over the gap that separates word from world ” 35 Instead of distrust and hermeneutic suspicion, then, what new sincerity literature demands of the reader is a general attitude of trust and faith, even and especially where manipulation looms This newly defined readerly position is, it seems to me, where new sincerity and postcritical reading conflate. Beginning with trust and faith rather than suspicion and superiority, yet not risking naiveté and manipulation by the author and text is the attitudinal, “dispositional” 36 challenge for both, played out aesthetically in the new sincerity literature, and with regard to methodology, in the post-critique debate So far, I have only implicitly addressed the larger socio-historical questions to which new sincerity responds by placing the reader at the center of its aesthetic and moral project Lee Konstantinou, in his stimulating monograph with the wonderfully polyvalent title Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction, offers some useful insights into this aspect, also shedding light on the particular network of valuing underlying contemporary American fiction. In the chapter “How to be a believer,” Konstantinou argues that the American public in the 1990s was permeated by “eschatological vision” 37 and a sense of the end of history, to which a number of writers responded with the development of a “narrative technology for fostering readerly belief,” 38 thus trying to instill “a disposition or attitude […] in the reader, often through formal means ” 39 According to him, “postironic” writers such as David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers use specific formal strategies to spur a “general ethos of 34 Ibid , 201 35 Felski, Limits of Critique, 173 36 Christopher Castiglia, “Hope for Critique? ” Critique and Postcritique, eds Elizabeth S Anker/ Rita Felski (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2017), 213 37 Konstantinou, Cool Characters, 167 38 Ibid , 164 39 Ibid , 166 286 m ichael b asseler 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 belief” 40 in the reader, which doesn’t depend on any ontological basis or belief system: “they insist on the necessity of cultivating belief, but without an ontological safety net ” 41 Part and parcel of the literary projects of those writers is to “regenerate a sense of wonder around reading,” while writing “against a culture defined by solipsism, anhedonia, cynicism, snark, and toxic irony.” 42 The cultivation of belief, for Konstantinou, is what Wallace bequeathed to the following generation of writers: “his advocacy of the ethos of belief as a solution to the problem of postmodern irony has had far-reaching consequences, shaping the priorities and concerns of a generation of writers ” 43 Thus influencing the course of literature in a similar way that the post/ modernist, ‘suspicious’ writers did with literary strategies such as the unreliable narrator, one might conclude that postironic writers helped to school the postironic reader that is currently entering the stage of the postcritique debate In the following section, I will finally turn to Saunders’ novel as an example of how contemporary literary fiction actively engages in the redefinition of readerly disposition, producing distinct acts of valuing that rely on sincerity and belief rather than suspicion and distrust 4 Listening to Ghosts: Awakening the Reader(s) in Lincoln in the Bardo Since the publication of CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996), George Saunders has not made himself a name as a writer who offers his readers instant (or, in Ricoeur’s terms, cheap) gratification. Mainly acknowledged for his (collections of) short stories, Saunders is clearly one of the most original voices in contemporary American literature, earning him, among other prestigious awards, the Man Booker Prize in 2017 for Lincoln in the Bardo The storyworlds 44 of his fiction typically relocate the reader to either the highly idiosyncratic perception of present-day United States through the perspectives of some ‘quirky’ 45 characters (e g “The 400 pound CEO,” “The Falls”) or to outright bizarre scenarios bordering on simulacra (e g the many theme parks in his short fiction), dreams (e.g. “The Semplica Girl Diaries”), science fiction 40 Ibid , 174 41 Ibid , 167 42 Ibid , 169 43 Ibid , 193 44 David Herman, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (Lincoln/ London: U of Nebraska P, 2002) 45 Cf Konstantinou, Cool Characters, 201-213 for a detailed discussion of the ‘quirky aesthetic’ in contemporary American literature and culture The Value of Literature and the Role of the Reader in 21st-Century Fiction 287 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 (e.g. “Escape from Spiderhead”), and other types of genre fiction (e.g. zombie lit in “Sea Oak”) The immediate effect of these storyworlds is often one of disorientation, defamiliarisation, and cognitive dissonance, as Saunders deliberately takes the reader out of their comfort zone At the same time, however, Saunders’ texts transcend this postmodern stance by infusing an aesthetic of sincerity: “What Saunders offers in place of […] intellectual distance and modernist lyricism is an emphasis on sincerity ” 46 Although significantly differing from an author like Dave Eggers in terms of his narrative style and techniques, Saunders ultimately shares with the postironic writers discussed by Konstantinou an “ethos of belief,” which in Saunders plays out in a distinct ethic and aesthetic of compassion, or kindness 47 As Philip Coleman and Steve Gronert Ellerhoff point out, “George Saunders writes with a strong sense of the moral agency of literature ” 48 What characterises his fiction, as I have argued elsewhere, is the way in which it “involves the reader emotionally and engages her in a compassionate relationship with the characters ” 49 He does so, however, by simultaneously deploying many of the same narrative devices associated with postmodern irony, thus utilising what Vera Nünning has aptly described as the “cognitive functions of polyvalence, complexity, and the denial of closure” 50 in order to increase rather than decrease the reader’s empathy The concept of ‘narrative empathy’ is useful to analyse how Saunders’ ethics and aesthetics of compassion play out in his fiction. 51 We may follow Suzanne Keen to describe ‘narrative empathy’ broadly as “the sharing of feeling and perspective-taking induced by reading, viewing, hearing, or imagining narratives of another’s situation and condition ” 52 Narratives are crucial for any account of our ability to empathise, 53 since it is only through stories that we can begin to understand the other Empathy is, as Fritz Breithaupt argues, 46 Kelly, “Language,” 43 47 On the correlation between aesthetic and ethical aspects in the work of Saunders, see Michael Basseler, “Narrative Empathy in George Saunders’s Short Fiction,” George Saunders: Critical Essays, eds Philip Coleman/ Steve Gronert Ellerhoff (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 153-172 48 Philip Coleman/ Steve Gronert Ellerhoff, eds George Saunders: Critical Essays (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), cii 49 Basseler, “Narrative Empathy,” 153 50 Vera Nünning, Reading Fictions, Changing Minds - The Cognitive Value of Literature (Heidelberg: Winter, 2014), 278 51 See Basseler, “Narrative Empathy ” 52 Suzanne Keen, “Narrative Empathy,” The Living Handbook of Narratology, eds Peter Hühn et al (Hamburg: Hamburg University, 2013) n p http: / / www lhn uni-hamburg de/ node/ 42 html 53 See Vera Nünning, Reading Fictions 288 m ichael b asseler 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 the decision to take sides with somebody (rather than somebody else), and this decision is legitimated emotionally and rationally through narrative 54 Saunders’ work not only employs this potential of narrative to induce empathy on the part of the reader, but he has developed a whole arsenal of narrative and stylistic techniques to create his particular version of narrative empathy Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders’ debut as a novelist, is a novel that, through its subject matter as well as its highly experimental form, poses a considerable challenge to the reader 55 Despite its “repertoire of what is familiar,” which perhaps might best be described along the terms of historiographic fiction and bio fiction, the novel willfully and profoundly disorients the (Western? ) reader through several narrative strategies as well as through its highly idiosyncratic storyworld and story logic 56 Drawing on the historical events around Abraham Lincoln’s mourning of his son Willie who died of typhoid fever in the midst of the Civil War in 1862, Lincoln in the Bardo departs from the familiar modes of historiographic and bio fiction as the bulk of its action is situated in the spiritual realm of the ‘bardo,’ a phenomenon that in Tibetan Buddhism describes the liminal state (or rather states) between death and rebirth: “The subject experiencing these bardos is not an unchanging soul (which concept does not exist in Buddhism) but the constantly changing continuum of consciousness which, according to spiritual advancement, becomes either sharpened or bewildered after disjunction from the body ” 57 The peculiar “modeling and inhabitation” 58 of its storyworld, thus, is not only crucial to any attempt at summarising the novel’s plot, but it shapes “the narrative comprehension” 59 of the novel in fundamental ways Ghosts (roughly defined here as deceased human beings with a retained consciousness and agency) frequently populate Saunders’ fiction to provide perspectives on social relations that usually elude the living: “By haunting 54 Fritz Breithaupt, Kulturen der Empathie (Frankfurt/ M : Suhrkamp, 2009), 175 55 Saunders himself embraces the novel’s bulkiness as a formal necessity for expressing its emotional core: “For me, the nice thing is that the book is hard, and it’s kind of weird and it’s not a traditional novel […] I didn’t do it just to be fancy, but because there was this emotional core I could feel, and that form was the only way I could get to it ” Alexandra Alter, “George Saunders wins the Man Booker Prize for ‘Lincoln in the Bardo,’”The New York Times, 17 October 2017, https: / / www nytimes com/ 2017/ 10/ 17/ books/ george-saunders-wins-man-booker-prize-lincoln-in-the-bardo html, n p 56 Herman, Story Logic 57 John Bowker, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (Oxford: OUP, 2003), n p 58 Erin James, The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives (Lincoln/ London: U of Nebraska P, 2015), xi 59 Ibid The Value of Literature and the Role of the Reader in 21st-Century Fiction 289 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 his artificial settings with ghosts, Saunders gives voice to souls lost among simulacra and offers resistance to the bewildering and dehumanizing forces of late capitalism ” 60 In Lincoln in the Bardo, however, Saunders takes this strategy one step further, as the presence of ghosts becomes the novel’s central structuring device The subjects experiencing the bardo in the novel are, besides the newly deceased Willie Lincoln, innumerable ghosts of people who have passed away yet not entirely left their former lives behind 61 As they linger on, night after night the ghosts step out of their coffins (euphemistically called “sick-boxes” by themselves) to recount their often tragic, sometimes comical and sometimes gruesome experiences while still among the living - experiences that now hinder them from passing over Among them are hans vollman, a middle-aged man whose life abruptly ended when he was hit by a falling beam while sitting at his desk, his “tremendous member” 62 a constant reminder of his unconsummated marriage with his youthful wife; roger bevins iii, a closeted gay who now appears with “numerous eyes, hands, and noses” (176) as to indicate his sense of life’s many wonders and pleasures tragically revealed to him in an epiphany while committing suicide; and the reverend everly thomas, who, unlike vollman, bevins, and “the dozens of other naifs” (187) accepts the fact that he is dead Apart from these three, the novel’s ghostly cast is comprised of people from all walks of life of antebellum America: men and women, young and old, rich and poor, northern and southern, white and black, masters and slaves, mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, innocent babies as well as criminals and murderers, rapists and raped, lovers and enemies, gay and straight people, devout believers and atheists, literati and illiterates As they remain in a state between life and death, or rather life and after-life (since death is the one reality they stubbornly refuse to accept), the reader, bit by bit, not only learns about their individual stories, but also witnesses how they gradually come to acknowledge their common fate as they learn to confront death as the great equaliser: “All were in sorrow, or had been, or soon would be” (304), as roger bevins puts it Populating his novel with ghosts allows Saunders to once again address what for him are the most central questions about human relationships: What 60 Dana Del George, “Ghosts and Theme Parks: The Supernatural and the Artificial in George Saunders’s Short Stories,” George Saunders: Critical Essays, eds Philip Coleman/ Steve Gronert Ellerhoff (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 121 61 According to one reviewer, the novel is told by 166 ghosts; Constance Grady, “166 ghosts tell the story of Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders’s fantastic first novel,” Vox, 09 March 2017, www vox com/ culture/ 2017/ 3/ 9/ 14764998/ lincoln-in-the-bardo-george-saunders-review, n p 62 George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo (London et al : Bloomsbury, 2017), 176 Subsequent quotations from this novel are referenced in parentheses in the text 290 m ichael b asseler 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 can we really know about others - their intentions, motifs, desires, confines -, and does this knowledge shape our own moral judgements and our behavior? These questions become most explicit in a scene in chapter LXXXI where several ghosts, among them a pedophile, a woman who had killed her husband, a couple who “did away” (270) with their baby, and a British soldier who gave the command to fire at the surrendering enemy reflect on what has led them to commit these cruel, inhuman acts “We were as we were,” one of them concludes, “How could we have been otherwise? Or, being that way, have done otherwise? We were that way, at that time, and had been led to that place, not by any innate evil in ourselves, but by the state of our cognition and our experience up until that moment ” (270) Note how careful Saunders is not to read some deeper meaning into the deeds, but to simply describe The ghosts’ acts of collective self-reflection are a crucial part of their bardo experience as the novel builds toward the mass exodus in which they pass over to another realm, the very act of which the novel describes as “matter-lightblooming phenomenon ” (i a , 300) The implication is that it is only through their communal experience in the bardo that the ghosts are finally able to overcome their spiritual and moral confinements and become whole again. Instead of framing it as a phenomenon of our biological hard-wiring, Saunders regards empathy as an ethical imperative, requiring us to commit ourselves, as Leslie Jamison put it, “to a set of behaviors greater than the sum of our individual inclinations: I will listen to his sadness, even when I’m deep in my own ” 63 This ethical dimension of empathy is what also drives Lincoln in the Bardo and demands from the reader that they listen to the ghosts in the same way they listen to each other: An individual’s view of the world is not the only possible one, different perspectives are possible: others attest to them Morality […] starts with one’s perception of the world through perspectives: the perspective of the other and one’s own In this constellation it is necessary that both perspectives can express themselves on equal terms 64 As I have argued before, 65 it is precisely this notion of (narrative) empathy, agency, and morality, which lies at the heart of Saunders’ writing, as it repeatedly and persistently urges us to reflect on our built-in self-centeredness, yet fully aware of the ethical limits of interpersonal understanding 63 Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (London: Granta, 2014), 23 64 Norbert Meuter, “Identity and Empathy: On the Correlation of Narrativity and Morality,” Rethinking Narrative Identity: Persona and Perspective, eds Claudia Holler/ Martin Klepper (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), 46 65 Basseler, “Narrative Empathy ” The Value of Literature and the Role of the Reader in 21st-Century Fiction 291 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 Expanding the novel’s philosophical foundation to its refiguration in the process of reading, one might reason that just like the subjects experiencing the bardo, the projected reader of Saunders’ novel is not an “unchanging soul,” but is required to inhabit a changing continuum of consciousness Through its quirky storyworld and radical polyphony and the ensuing lack of any privileged narrative instance, Lincoln in the Bardo not only stimulates an exceptionally active reading (or active listening, in the critically acclaimed audio version), but Saunders uses this strategy to prestructure a particular role, or disposition, for the reader This disposition is schooled by a postmodern aesthetic yet ultimately seeks to transcend it and elicit new acts of valuing in response to a culture of perceived solipsism, snark, and irony Lucas Thompson suggests “method reading” as a ‘postcritical’ metaphor to describe such a readerly disposition 66 Method reading, as derived from “method acting” and the performative embodiment of characters associated with it, “takes literary texts as invitations to engage in a particular kind of activity, wherein the reader does not merely identify with, develop sympathies for, or even recognize herself in a fictional character, but actually performs as someone else ” 67 Reading, in this parsing, is the performative act through which we project ourselves onto different characters, “enjoying the vicarious thrill of certain emotions and actions ” 68 And while he proposes method reading as a general metaphor for postcritique, Thompson regards Lincoln in the Bardo as a paradigmatic text to experience method reading: “it’s hard to think of another text that so neatly demonstrates the fact that certain novels can teach us how they want to be read ” 69 Freely entering and exiting other ghosts as well as human beings through their ability of “co-habitation,” the ghosts - as a textual narrative strategy - resemble or mimic the act of reading: In Saunders’s unmistakable allegory for the act of reading fiction, whatever is most present in the inhabitant’s consciousness is in the foreground, but those occupying the same space have access to broader forms of personal knowledge as well […] There is something inherently ghostly, Saunders tells us, about the second-hand feelings and sensations a novel brings about 70 66 “The postcritique project will necessarily involve developing new metaphors and dusting off overlooked ones in an attempt to find ways of doing greater justice to the felt reality of reading ” Lucas Thompson, “Method Reading,” New Literary History 50 2 (2019), 295 67 Ibid 68 Ibid , 296 69 Ibid , 301 70 Ibid , 300-301 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 292 m ichael b asseler As we read novels, we “are invited to perform the same inhabitations that the ghosts are capable of,” 71 i.e. to “flesh out” various characters by temporarily thinking, experiencing, and feeling what they think, experience, and feel Constructing these rather strange inhabitations as acts of valuing each other’s perspectives on the story level, the novel projects its main structural principle onto the reception process, inviting the reader to join in the ghosts’ communal experience described as “One mass-mind, united in positive intention” (254), as the ghosts simultaneously ‘co-inhabit’ Abraham Lincoln during one of his visits at the graveyard so that Willie may finally pass over to the next life The reader of Lincoln in the Bardo, in other words, is not and ultimately cannot be conceived of as an unchanging soul, but is meant to perform the same “changing continuum of consciousness” that the novel invents through its storyworld, character conception, and multiperspectival structure 5 Conclusion As I have argued, in Lincoln in the Bardo Saunders construes a storyworld that evokes a complex network of literary valuing in which the question of readerly disposition is foregrounded and shaped by the novel’s ghostly aesthetic, implicitly entertaining some connections to the recent critique/ postcritique debate Heather Love, in her much-noted essay “Close But Not Deep,” offers a reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved that refuses to follow the common interpretation of Sethe’s murdered daughter as symbolic placeholder for the ethical lessons of history She urges us to “let ghosts be ghosts,” 72 thus echoing Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’ plea for surface reading, or “just reading” (‘just’ in the sense of ‘only’ and ‘fair’ as well as ‘reasonable’) as opposed to critical or depth hermeneutics: “Just reading sees ghosts as presences, not absences, and lets ghosts be ghosts, instead of saying what they are ghosts of ” 73 In Saunders’ fiction, and especially in Lincoln in the Bardo, it is almost impossible to read the ghosts as anything other than presences on the surface of the narrative: In the novel’s storyworld the ghosts are as real as the living, and they talk to each other and to us as readers, forcing us to listen, and serving as a literary device to transcend the limited views that confine us, the living, to ourselves and our own narrow perspectives If the value of literature is the always provisional, historically and culturally specific product of activities of mediation, or acts of valuing, then it 71 Ibid , 301 72 Heather Love, “Close But Not Deep,” New Literary History, 41 2 (2010), 387 73 Stephen Best/ Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108 1 (2009), 13 293 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 The Value of Literature and the Role of the Reader in 21st-Century Fiction seems worthwhile to take a closer look at the aesthetic forms through which contemporary fiction attempts to shape the value of literature by devising a particular readerly disposition 74 Saunders’ novel, and by extension perhaps the bulk of new sincerity/ postironic literature, suggests a new paradigm for postcritical reading that acknowledges the unfinished business of our ethical models and decisions, yet refuses to let go of hope, kindness, and compassion to counter the omnipresence of suspicion, complacency, and snark in contemporary culture Projecting “texts and readers as cocreators of meaning,” 75 new sincerity literature and postcritique are, just like the ghosts in Saunders’ novel, “united in positive intention” to shape and explore new kinds of social relations in and through literature After all, as Christopher Castiglia reminds us, the “function of critique need not be only the articulation of ‘bad news,’ it might also encourage the risky speculations that would make critics active participants in making the kinds of social relations we nominally seek but rarely ‘find’ […] ‘in’ literature.” 76 In this sense, he suggests to “see literature not only as the object of criticism but as its best model,” so that “we might again have a critique in the service of living value, a self-transforming and adaptable willingness to hold vision above necessity ” 77 In other words, we shouldn’t only let ghosts be ghosts but listen closely to what they have to tell us It is in this sense that Saunders’ novel might serve as a model for a kind of postcritical reading that is not suspicious, superior, or paranoid, but restorative and hopeful, providing us with an opportunity to reclaim the value of literature in the service of living value Works Cited Alter, Alexandra “George Saunders wins the Man Booker Prize for ‘Lincoln in the Bardo ’” The New York Times, 17 October 2017, https: / / www nytimes com/ 2017/ 10/ 17/ books/ george-saunders-wins-man-booker-prize-lincoln-in-the-bardo html Accessed 07 April 2020 Basseler, Michael “Narrative Empathy in George Saunders’s Short Fiction ” George Saunders: Critical Essays Eds Philip Coleman/ Steve Gronert Ellerhoff Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, 153-172 74 That strategies of “writing the reader” are all but exclusive to contemporary literature was shown by Dorothee Birke (2016) in her eponymous book, in which she argues that the foregrounding of (obsessive) readers in 18th and 19th century novels served as an instrument of cultural reflection and self-promotion. Birke, Writing the Reader. Figurations of a Cultural Practice in the English Novel (Berlin/ New York: De Gruyter, 2016) 75 Felski, Limits of Critique, 173 76 Castiglia, “Hope for Critique,” 212 77 Ibid , 218 Basseler, Michael/ Ansgar Nünning “The American Novel in the 21 st Century: Changing Contexts, Literary Developments, New Modes of Reading ” The American Novel in the 21st Century: Cultural Contexts - Literary Developments - Critical Analyses Eds eid , in collaboration with Nico Völker Trier: WVT, 2019, 1-36 Best, Stephen/ Sharon Marcus “Surface Reading: An Introduction ” Representations 108 1 (2009), 1-21 Birke, Dorothee Writing the Reader: Figurations of a Cultural Practice in the English Novel Berlin/ New York: De Gruyter, 2016 Bowker, John The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions Oxford: OUP, 2003 Online version Boxall, Peter Twenty-First Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction Cambridge: CUP, 2013 Breithaupt, Fritz Kulturen der Empathie Frankfurt/ M : Suhrkamp, 2009 Castiglia, Christopher “Hope for Critique? ” Critique and Postcritique Eds Elizabeth S Anker/ Rita Felski Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2017, 211-229 Del George, Dana. “Ghosts and Theme Parks: The Supernatural and the Artificial in George Saunders’s Short Stories ” George Saunders: Critical Essays Eds Philip Coleman/ Steve Gronert Ellerhoff Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, 121-135 Felski, Rita “Postcritical Reading ” American Book Review 38 5 (2017), 4-5 Felski, Rita The Limits of Critique Chicago/ London: U of Chicago P, 2015 Grabes, Herbert Making Strange: Beauty, Sublimity, and the (Post)Modern ‘Third Aesthetic’ Amsterdam/ New York: Rodopi 2008 Gladstone, Jason/ Daniel Worden “Introduction ” Postmodern | Postwar - and After: Rethinking American Literature Ed Jason Gladstone/ Andrew Hoberek/ Daniel Worden Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2016, 1-26 Grady, Constance “166 ghosts tell the story of Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders’s fantastic first novel.” Vox, 09 March 2017, https: / / www vox com/ culture/ 2017/ 3/ 9/ 14764998/ lincoln-in-the-bardo-george-saunders-review Accessed 07 April 2020 Herman, David Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln/ London: U of Nebraska P, 2002 James, Erin The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives Lincoln/ London: U of Nebraska P, 2015 Jamison, Leslie The Empathy Exams London: Granta, 2014 Keen, Suzanne “Narrative Empathy ” The Living Handbook of Narratology Eds Peter Hühn/ John Pier/ Wolf Schmid/ Jörg Schönert Hamburg: Hamburg University, 2013 www lhn uni-hamburg de/ node/ 42 html Accessed 07 April 2020 Kelly, Adam “The New Sincerity ” Postmodern | Postwar - and After: Rethinking American Literature Eds Jason Gladstone/ Andrew Hoberek/ Daniel Worden Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2016, 197-208 --- “Language Between Lyricism and Corporatism: George Saunders’s New Sincerity ” George Saunders: Critical Essays Eds Philip Coleman/ Steve Gronert Ellerhoff Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, 41-58 Konstantinou, Lee Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction Cambridge/ London: Harvard UP, 2016 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 294 m ichael b asseler 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 Latour, Bruno “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? ” Critical Inquiry 30 2 (2004), 225-48 Locatelli, Angela “Literature’s Version of its Own Transmission of Values Ethics in Culture: The Dissemination of Values Through Literature and Other Media Eds Astrid Erll/ Herbert Grabes/ Ansgar Nünning Berlin/ New York: De Gruyter, 2008, 19-34 Love, Heather “Close But Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn ” New Literary History 41 2 (2010), 371-391 Meuter, Norbert “Identity and Empathy: On the Correlation of Narrativity and Morality ” Rethinking Narrative Identity: Persona and Perspective Eds Claudia Holler/ Martin Klepper Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013, 33-48 Meyer-Lee, Robert J “Toward a Theory and Practice of Literary Valuing ” New Literary History 46 2 (2015), 335-355 Nünning, Vera Reading Fictions, Changing Minds - The Cognitive Value of Literature Heidelberg: Winter, 2014 Thompson, Lucas “Method Reading ” New Literary History 50 2 (2019), 293-321 Ricoeur, Paul Freud and Philosophy (1965) New Haven/ London: Yale UP, 1970 Ricoeur, Paul Time and Narrative. Vol 3 (1985) Chicago: Chicago UP, 2003 Saunders, George Lincoln in the Bardo London et al: Boomsbury, 2017 Waugh, Patricia Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction New York: Routledge, 1984 295 The Value of Literature and the Role of the Reader in 21st-Century Fiction