Can Goodness Win?

George Saunders on
Writing, the Artists Task, and the
Importance of Living with Opposing
Truths
See how long you can stay in that space, where both
things are true Thats a great place to try to be.
By Maria Popova
Can Goodness Win? George Saunders on Writing, the Artists Task, and the Importance
of Living with Opposing Truths
The job as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy of the artist is to embrace
uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it, Dani Shapiro wrote in her beautiful
meditation on the pleasures and perils of the creative life. How to inhabit that
pleasurable, perilous place of uncertainty is what George Saunders explores throughout
his conversation with Deborah Eisenberg, found in Upstairs at the Strand: Writers in
Conversation at the Legendary Bookstore (public library) that marvelous record of
public encounters between literary titans at the Rare Book Room of New Yorks iconic
Strand bookstore, which gave us Junot Daz on our limiting mythos of success and
which features such celebrated writers as Alison Bechdel, A.M. Homes, Renata Adler,
Wendy Lesser, and Mark Strand (who is not related to the famed bookstore but is, via
paternity, to the volumes editor, Jessica Strand).
georgesaunders
Two generations after William Faulkner asserted in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech
that the role of the writer is to help man endure by lifting his heart, Saunders shares a
reflection wonderfully countercultural amid our era of marketable tragedy and rampant
cynicism:
When I was younger, I was for some stupid reason really taken aback by the realization
that capitalism could be harsh. It had never occurred to me before. So my work tended
to be a little preoccupied with that notion, maybe. My wife and I fell head over heels,
and had our daughters pretty quickly. Now weve been married for twenty-six years and
our daughters are grown up and wonderful. So lately my feeling is there ought to be a
place for some fictional corollary of the fact that sometimes things actually work An
artist can sometimes represent the idea that things can be wonderful.
Responding to the observation that a line from a short story of his Can goodness
win? encapsulates an undergirding concern across all of his work, Saunders adds:

Why not? Yes, it can win. But it can also lose can get humiliated. It can also cause
other people problems, by morphing into self-righteousness. I think what a fiction writer
does is represent different viewpoints vividly. And without necessarily seeming to prefer
one over the other. Can goodness win? Yes, it does all the time. No, it cannot: it
loses all the time. Both true.
[]
See how long you can stay in that space, where both things are true. You, little mind,
actually dont have to decide. Thats a great place to try to be. And for a fiction writer,
thats the best place to be: youve put two apparently opposing truths in the air and
youre just letting them hang there, knowing that the real truth is that opposition.
In a sentiment that calls to mind Denise Levertovs notion of the midwifery of creative
work, Saunders suggests that even if one were to inhabit that opposition, one cant
forcibly wrest out of it the sort of aliveness that makes art. Rather than trying to will it,
one ought to be willing to let it come into a life of its own. He reflects on having this
pivotal realization when he was starting out as a writer and finding his own voice:
I found out that the same minute I had an idea about what I wanted to write, life would
go out of it. Im a Bear of Little Brain, as Winnie the Pooh would say. My challenge is
to try to keep the themes out of what Im writing as long as possible Einstein said it
better: No worthy problem is ever solved on the plane of its original conception.
Its got more integrity if it comes in of its own accord.
At the end of the event, in answering a readers question, Saunders returns to the
inherent duality of life and the notion that although were animated by conflicting
impulses and irrepressible moral imperfection, we can still live rich and beautiful lives.
Echoing Parker Palmers ennobling assertion that wholeness does not mean perfection:
it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life, Saunders observes:
At any given moment youre failing to see the way things actually are. The
manifestation is that youre failing to be kind. Youre anxious. Youre neurotic. I dont
think its so much about external things. I think you could be a very happy, highfunctioning person and still note the moment-to-moment failures.
Complement this particular portion of the wholly terrific Upstairs at the Strand a
trove of unscripted wisdom on literature and life from of the greatest writers of our time
with George Saunderss moving commencement address about the power of
kindness, then revisit this evolving library of notable wisdom on writing, including
Hemingways advice to young writers, Virginia Woolf on writing and self-doubt, Ann
Patchett on the importance of self-forgiveness, Neil Gaimans eight rules of writing, and
Grace Paley on the value of not understanding everything.