Lincoln in the Bardo, winner of the 2017 Mann Booker Prize, has been widely praised as a remarkable vision of human life and its possibilities that is formally daring but also moving and accessible. It is all those things, but it is also the first truly great western Buddhist novel
Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders, Random House, 2017; pp. 384.
We are in the Washington graveyard where nine-year-old Willie Lincoln, son of the American President, has recently been laid to rest following a sudden and dramatic illness. Grieving him are his distraught mother, who figures only slightly, and his father, Abraham Lincoln, whose other concern is the progress of the Civil War into which he has led his country. The seed of the novel is a visit paid to the graveyard by the real President Lincoln in the middle of the night shortly after Willie’s death and at a crisis point in the War.
The novel is largely in the voices of the ghosts who inhabit the graveyard, though these are supplemented by wittily arranged excerpts from textual sources connected to this episode. The central conceit is that the ghosts linger because they are in the grip of the emotions and preoccupations that obsessed them in their lives and shape their ghostly existence in a literal way.
One of the main voices is Hans Vollman who died before he could consummate his marriage to a young bride and consequently in the afterlife has an enormous erection, which he carries in his hands for fear of tripping. He inhabits a world of evasion and euphemism, asserting that he is merely resting in a ‘sick box’ (rather than a coffin), and will shortly be roused. His companion is Roger Bevins III, a hyperactive homosexual who cut his wrists and believes he is still lying on the kitchen floor. A third is Reverend Everly Thomas, who the others consider an ‘“old bore”, and around them are numerous other figures, presented with virtuoso variation, each with his or her delusion or obsession, right down to Mr Papers, ‘Essentially a cringing gray, supine line … of whom one would only become aware one one had stumbled over him.’
In the background of Lincoln in the Bardo are the underworlds of Homer and Virgil and especially Dante, whose afterlife is really this life seen in moral relief. In modern literature we use the term for the notion that the reality we experience of is subjectively coloured, and Lincoln in the Bardo amalgamates the older precedents with modern forms. It also captures the mentalities of the ghosts with naturalistic sensitivity: these are real (dead) people, as well as shape-shifters who construct personal tragic universes.
But the key influence is Buddhism, which has always taught that our experience depends on our states of mind and that the world we experience is, in some sense, a figuration of our mental states. This connects with Buddhist ideas about rebirth via the teaching that we are reborn according to the underlying tendencies of our minds that have been developed in our lives. This is, roughly speaking, what Buddhists mean by karma.
Classical Buddhist literature has many descriptions of spirit realms and hell realms, including the realm of pretas, hungry spirits who embody a kind of neurotic craving. The process that leads to rebirth is usually left rather vague, but the idea of a passage from one body to the next implies the possibility of an intermediate state, and this connects with popular beliefs cancerning ghosts. Ghosts consequently figure in various Buddhist cultures, and many Japanese Noh plays, for example, centre on a figure cannot move on to their next life because attachments such as doomed love tie them to their old surroundings.
The fullest account of the intermediate realm is found in Tibetan Buddhism, and the title of Lincoln in the Bardo alludes to the Bardo Thodol, commonly known The Tibetan Book of the Dead according to which the bardo is the post-mortem state in which the departed consciousness awaits rebirth in a future realm. The text is a guide to the deceased consciousness in his or her passage through the bardo, but for Carl Jung, who wrote a foreword to the translation, and Timothy Leary, who made it a focus of his book The Psychedelic Experience, its significance is what it tells us about the mind and consciousness per se. Whatever its role in Tibetan Culture, in the West the bardo has become an image for consciousness, its patterns and its potentialites.
An important feature of life in the bardo is that the departed consciousness doesn’t realise that it is dead, and this prompts the reflection that perhaps in our lives we don’t truly understand the nature of our experience. A beautiful sequence in Lincoln in the Bardo describes a visit by the angels to graveyard where the ghosts linger and appear to them in a form designed to cut through their defences. They appear to Roger Bevins in the form of the young man he had loved and their words encapsulate the lesson the ghosts must learn:
‘One of the multiple Gilberts came over and, kneeling beside me, asked, would I kindly unstop my ears and just please look at him?
Something in his voice made it impossible to disobey.
He was beautiful beyond measure.
Come with us, he whispered. Here it is all savagery and delusion. You are of finer stuff. Come with us, all is forgiven.
We know what you did, said a second Gilbert. It is all right.
I did not do it, I said. It is not complete.
It is, the first Gilbert said.
I may yet reverse it, I said.
Dear boy, said the second.
Soften, soften, said a third.
You are a wave that has crashed upon the shore, said a fourth.
Kindly don’t bother, I said. I have heard all of this—
Let me tell you something, said the second Gilbert harshly. You are not lying on any floor, in any kitchen. Are you? Look around, fool. You delude yourself. It is complete. You have completed it.
We say these things to speed you along, said the first.’
The angels are eloquent but they are ‘terrible’ like the angels in Rilke or Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, both of which are palpable influences, and the ghosts are too scared to heed their urgings.
Salvation comes instead from Abraham Lincoln and his love for his son. The President returns to the cemetery and embraces Willie’s dead body, moving the ghosts deeply because ‘no one had ever come here to hold us, while speaking so tenderly.’ But he promises to return, and Willie waits for him which, in Saunders’ version of the bardo, is a mistake for a child, who risks being trapped forever. The ghosts try to lure Abraham back so that Willie may be released and, in contrast to their usual self-absorption, they are now forced to cooperate and even to merge with one another: ‘We found ourselves (like flowers from which placed rocks had been removed, somewhat restored to our natural fullness’ says Bevins.
What’s more, they overhear Abraham’s thoughts and are touched by his feelings at a moment of intensity crisis and compassion:
His mind was freshly inclined toward sorrow; toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow; that everyone labored under some burden of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact; that his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all, but, rather, its like had been felt, would be felt, by scores of others, in all times, in every time, and must not be prolonged or exaggerated, because, in this state, he could be of no help to anyone and, given that his position in the world situated him to be either of great help, or great harm, it would not do to stay low, if he could help it.
This is the antithesis of the self-protective delusions that keep the ghosts in the bardo. Lincoln’s compassion transforms him and liberates the ghosts who, one by one, accept their true position. They really are dead. What they take to be real is an illusions projected by their consciousness. They are bound by deep-seated habits and delusions. And liberation comes by accepting the truth.
More than its echoes of Tibetan Buddhism, this message and its magnificent embodiment is what makes Lincoln in the Bardo the first truly great western Buddhist novel.
Vishvapani is the Buddhist contributor to Thought for The Day on BBC Radio 4 and the author of Gautama Buddha: The Life and Teachings of the Awakened One
