When Art is Not Art

One of My Favorite Writers Goes Kinetic

One of the dumber things I did in my graduate MFA program—and I did several of them—was not to seek out George Saunders as a teacher/mentor. He was a visiting writer there (or at least that’s what I remember),¹ and all I had read of him was Civil War in Bad Decline, which I dismissed as kind of snarky.

Since then, I’ve revised my opinion, particularly in the wake of A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, his book on Russian short-story writers. A former student gave me that book as a gift, and I was so impressed by Saunders’ insights that I now use it as a central text in my course, “Reading Like a Writer: Short Fiction.” Moreover, I’ve taught his short stories many times, including “Winky,” “Pastoralia,” and “Puppy,” all of which are masterpieces of dark comedy, the genre of fiction I most admire and most align myself with as a fiction writer. He is uniquely gifted both as a writer and reader of fiction.

So, I don’t want to pick a fight with this guy whom I greatly admire and who has rightly earned a place as one of the foremost short-story writers of our time.

But I’m going to go hard, nonetheless, on one of his stories in this post and, along the way, take swats at another writer whose work I admire, David Sedaris, and at an editor whose attention every writer desires, Deborah Treisman, fiction editor of The New Yorker.

It’s all just part of my slow-motion Substack fiction career seppuku.

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I assign the New Yorker Fiction podcast regularly in my RLAW class. In that podcast, New Yorker fiction writers read their favorite stories by other writers published in the magazine and then discuss them with Treisman.² The podcast beautifully models how writers—as opposed to academics, reviewers, and casual readers—talk about stories. And since I rely heavily on Saunders’ book in my class, I wanted to choose one of his stories from the podcast.

As of this writing, the most recent New Yorker Fiction podcast episode happens to be a Saunders’ story: ‘Love Letter” read by David Sedaris, and I listened to it this morning while walking the dog and decided I will not be using it because the story and the discussion around it contradicts what I teach both in terms of what constitutes art and how we talk about it.³

While it certainly is “short fiction,” I don’t consider “Love Letter” a short story proper but rather a species of political satire disguised as a short story. In my view, it is a perfect example of what James Joyce calls kinetic or “improper” art.

I explain this distinction in my post, Writers, Prophets, and Pundits, where I draw on Joyce’s famous distinction. To recap,

In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce’s protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, makes the following observation:

“The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. These are kinetic emotions. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I use the general term) is, therefore, static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.”

Kinetic art, Stephen suggests, is an “improper art” in that it seeks to provoke a desire to do or possess, whether that’s buying a Coke (advertising), losing mastery of your domain (pornography), or changing your views (punditry). “Proper art” is static; we are raised above simple desires and resentments. We are content to be in the work and don’t need to do anything.

“Love Letter,” I would argue, as evidenced both by what is in the story itself and the way Sedaris and Treisman discuss it, is kinetic and, therefore, “improper” art, or rather not art at all, but something else, if not propaganda then some form of electioneering.

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“Love Letter” is an epistolary story told in the form of a letter from an unnamed grandfather to his unnamed 19-year-old grandson. The grandfather advises his grandson what not to do about a friend, possibly a girlfriend, who has run afoul of a totalitarian United States government. She's been detained where no one can locate her because "although J. is a citizen, she forfeited certain rights and privileges by declining to offer the requested info on G. & M. " In other words, she wouldn't inform on G., who was undocumented, and M., who "does not lack proper paperwork but did know, all the while, that G. did lack it."⁴ The boy wants to help her, and the grandfather is sympathetic but advises caution. They live now in a country where “living here is a privilege, not a right,” where they “change the laws constantly to suit their own beliefs!” He reports a chilling moment when a cop pulls him over to warn him off of writing political letters to the editor of the local newspaper.

So far, this could be any totalitarian future. But then the grandfather says he has regrets about not doing more to save the country from destruction during “a certain critical period” of political destruction, and we get this paragraph:

Because this destruction was emanating from such an inept source, who seemed (at that time) merely comically thuggish, who seemed to know so little about what he was disrupting, and because life was going on, and because every day he/they burst through some new gate of propriety, we soon found that no genuine outrage was available to us anymore. If you’ll allow me a crude metaphor (as I’m sure you, the King of las Bromas de Fartos, will): a guy comes into a dinner party, takes a dump on the rug in the living room. The guests get all excited, yell in protest. He takes a second dump. The guests feel, Well, yelling didn’t help. (While some of them applaud his audacity.) He takes a third dump, on the table, and still no one throws him out. At that point, the sky has become the limit in terms of future dumps.

You may say I’m projecting or “reading into,” but the “comically thuggish” clown who craps on cultural norms⁵ so obviously encapsulates the left’s view of Trump it cannot be ignored.⁶

Indeed, the grandfather explicitly aligns himself against “Those f___ing Republican senators,” and if that weren’t enough to clue you in, among the norms he says the administration has broken are: “the targeting of judges. . . . investigations into pundits, and the casting aside of term limits.” Trump has, of course—not very creditably in my view—been accused of targeting judges,⁷ wanting to jail pundits who criticize him, and doing away with the Constitutional presidential term limits so he can have a third term.⁸

Add to that that the story was first published in March 2020 in a far-left journal and is set in the 2020s, and you’d have to be willfully blind not to see “Love Letter” as designed to bestir (supposedly) complacent liberals/Democrats to vote against Trump before he wins and becomes a dictator.

Treisman and Sedaris are not shy about connecting the story directly to Trump and spend most of their discussion drawing connections between the former president and the unnamed leader in the story—and comparatively little time discussing craft, as is the norm in this podcast.

Sedaris observes: “Like the whole story would have been ruined if [Saunders] put the word ‘Trump’ in the story. It just would have been ruined, but we all just kind of get an idea who he is.”

Thus, he admits, the story names Trump while not naming him. But does the not-naming really avoid the ruin of the story?

Junot Diaz’s amazing novel The Brief Wondrous of Oscar Wao does not avoid naming the real dictator Rafael Trujillo, whose regime plays a large part in the main character’s life. However, the naming does not ruin the story; it remains “proper” art. Why? Because its aims are larger than arousing fear and loathing of Trujillo or instilling immediate action against a particular regime at a particular time.

Treisman likewise tries to give Saunders a pass on propaganda.

“This is a story that obviously has real-life inspirations,” she says. “But you can read it kind of as a moral tale, as a morality tale about how easy it is to become inured to evil, darkness. . . . it’s not only political satire.”

Her “kind of” qualification is an obvious tell that she’s stretching and that the story actually is “only political satire.”⁹

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The premise of “Love Letter” is not inherently political, at least not in a small p way, i.e., Republican—or Democrat-aligned. One could imagine a dystopian future in which this story is set that is neither clearly one nor the other, that has no obvious party alliance, a story like “The Lottery,” to which Sedaris compares “Love Letter.”

Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t already read “The Lottery,” do so now because I’m not pulling any plot punches.

In “The Lottery—Shirley Jackson's widely anthologized short story—the author imagines a dystopian reality in which people in a small village stone to death a woman chosen for arbitrary sacrifice by lottery. Much of the story’s energy comes from the reader’s horrified reaction to the ease with which the villagers go along with this barbaric custom simply because it’s a custom.

Certainly, you could read this story as some sort of small p political hit against 1940s Conservatives or McCarthyism or, Evangelicals or the German people of the 1930s, but you don’t have to. The story does not ask us to hate or oppose any particular political party, religion, person, people, organization, or policy, and most readers take it as a universal indictment of the human capacity to go along with cruelty for the sake of tradition or some abstract notion of the greater good.

And though high school teachers may assign “The Lottery” for the apparent moral lesson, audiences love it as much or more because it’s a top-notch horror story. Jackson is a master of language, dialogue, suspense, and surprise. If there were not one iota of moral message in this story, it would still be read along with tales such as “The Monkey’s Paw” and “The Most Dangerous Game.”

Sedaris laments that Saunders’ story did not have nearly the impact of Jackson’s, attributing that difference to the reduced impact of short stories in contemporary culture. This is a true but insufficient reason.

“Love Letter” didn’t catch on like “The Lottery” because it’s not a great story qua story. It’s not timeless. It’s a story written to motivate 2020 Democrats to vote for their candidate.

At best “Love Letter” might be put in a category with the novel 1984, which I argue in my Substack on kinetic art, is not proper art either but rather an extremely well-written and important work of political satire. But “Love Letter” is much more politically specific than the generalized anti-totalitarian take of Orwell’s novel, and I don’t think it will be remembered the way, say, Saunders’ story “Pastoralia” will be.

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Treisman herself says, “It’s really hard to write a good short story that has a political agenda.”

She seems to think, however, that “Love Letter” is a good political short story while simultaneously acknowledging, “At the time [of its first publishing], I thought of it as a call to arms.”

I suppose she doesn’t subscribe to Joyce’s theory of kinetic art quite like I do. I know a lot of writers don’t.¹⁰

Sedaris insists “Love Letter” is art, partly because the story sympathetically depicts the grandfather. It forgives him for his lack of action prior to the disastrous election.

But Saunders’ generosity here, such as it is, is directed entirely toward the left, and if we imagine Saunders as on the left and the vast majority of The New Yorker readers on the left, well, that’s not much of a stretch for the artist. It’s empathy in the range of from A to C, at best.

We’re not, for example, asked to empathically understand a guy who voted for Trump, only for the guy who voted against him but didn’t do more to stop him. Maybe Grandpa should have protested more. Donated more money. Taken an AR-15 up to a roof at a Trump rally . . . .

No, this story is not a moral tale for the ages. It was a partisan call in the spring of 2020 to get out the Democratic vote against Trump, and the recent reading of it on The New Yorker Podcast is a call to do the same.

It’s a call to action, not art.

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All this is not to say Saunders should not have written the story or that The New Yorker shouldn’t have published it.

If you believe the house is on fire, you do whatever you have to do to get people out. If you think the plane has been hijacked by terrorists who are going to fly it into the White House, you do whatever you can to take them out.

These are noble acts. But they are not art.

Is/was it vital to light a fire under the ass of New Yorker readers to get them out to vote for Biden or Harris?

Some readers will say yes. Some no.

My main point is that this is a political question, not an artistic one.

1. I say this because I’m not finding any evidence online that he was there, but I swear I remember him being on faculty and going to one of his readings. Or is this some kind of false memory like that Fruit of the Loom thing?

2. Who often has edited the story before publication.

3. You might, of course, argue that’s exactly why I should teach it. And there is room in my class to contradict even my most deeply held opinions. But there’s no way to teach this particular story at this particular time without risking a full digression into 2024 presidential politics, which I won’t be doing in any classroom.

4. This italicized portion of the synopsis is care of Substack writer ItCouldBeWorse who corrected my original summary.

5. I’m tempted, but will not at this moment, list one after another dump on the table of norms one could attribute either to the Biden administration or the cultural left, but it’s clear in this story that the dump-taking all comes from the right.

6. Also, of course, the fear of the US descending into a dictatorship immediately following the election of the opposition candidate is almost entirely a Democratic one.

7. This linked article is from Feb 2020, a month before “Love Letter” was published.

8. I’m aware he’s joked about this, but I, for one, do not take it seriously. I don’t see any way he could accomplish this short of a military coup, and I have enough faith in the stability of our system not to consider that a possibility.

9. Moreover, her use of the term “evil” concerning a story whose target is obviously Trump demonstrates the level of her political nuance, that and her repetition in the podcast of two debunked hoax claims that Trump suggested injecting bleach to cure covid and not to eat Chinese food to avoid it. .

10. Saunders, however, does seem to agree with Joyce, despite “Love Letter.” In A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, he writes: “Fiction doesn’t support polemic very well. Because the writer invents all the elements, a story isn’t really in a position to ‘prove’ anything. (If I make a dollhouse out of ice cream and put it in the sun, it doesn’t prove the notion ‘Houses melt.’”