Copyright 1995 National Public Radio
NPR
SHOW: All Things Considered (NPR 4:30 pm ET)
April 18, 1995
Transcript # 1821-12
HEADLINE: New Novella 'Bounty' Tweaks Corporate Speak
GUESTS: GEORGE SAUNDERS, Writer;
BYLINE: ROBERT SIEGEL
HIGHLIGHT:
Writer George Saunders says his experience as a corporate type and a slaughterhouse employee gave him the courage to write this exaggerated story of a future America populated by flaweds and normals.
BODY:
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host: People with genetic flaws are enslaved in a striking new novella by George Saunders called 'Bounty.' It's in the April issue of Harper's magazine. Saunders has published a few stories, including one that won a national magazine award. 'The 400 Pound CEO,' it's called. His first collection of stories is to be published early next year. 'Bounty,' the novella, is set in a nuclear war-torn and famished America whose population is segregated into normals and flaweds, who wear mandatory bracelets and are enslaved, west of the Mississippi.
George Saunders' narrator, Cole, is a fugitive, wandering in the West without his bracelet in search of his sister. His characters talk in the euphemisms of self-help gurus and management consultants, even when the subject is slavery. Early in this story, one of his bosses reminds Cole of his genetic flaw, his misshapen feet.
GEORGE SANDERS, Author: 'In many senses,' Orvalen [sp] says expansively, 'I used to more or less like you in some ways. That's why I'm asking you to objectively regard your situation. Take off your shoes.' I give him a look. 'Just do it,' he says. So I take off my shoes. He sits next to me and takes off his. 'What I've got going here are toes,' he says. 'In your case, those may be fairly described as claws. Am I wrong?' 'No,' I say. I could kill him for this. If there's one thing I'm well aware of, it's the distinction between toes and claws.
'These feet identify you forever and always as flawed,' he says. 'Even if you could somehow rid yourself of your flawed bracelet, your deformed feet would scream out from every tree top the pertinent information on your unfortunate condition, by virtue of which, in the Western portion of our nation, a man like yourself may literally be purchased and enslaved. Do I talk sense? Is this line of thought making a dent on your self-perception?' 'Yes,' I say.
ROBERT SIEGEL: George Saunders is 36. He works as a geophysical engineer in Rochester, New York, and he has a fine ear for contemporary, empty rhetoric.
GEORGE SAUNDERS: I work in a corporate environment, and a person may have nothing to say and so they have to say it in that particular way, and I- a little bit like Orwell, I think in the politics of the English language, you see this correlation between imprecision of speech and positive ideas, and so in the world that I live in there's often a kind of agenda behind words. And when the words start getting blurry and start being ungrammatical and making no sense, the agenda sort of reveals itself.
ROBERT SIEGEL: So instead of understand, 'is this line of thought making a dent on your self-perception.'
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Right, right. Exactly.
ROBERT SIEGEL: You work in a corporate environment. Now you are by profession a geophysical engineer.
GEORGE SAUNDERS: That's true.
ROBERT SIEGEL: What is a geophysical engineer?
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Well, at this point it's an obsolete species that used to work in the oil fields and sits around reminiscing about it all the time. I went over to Sumatra and worked in the oil fields for a couple of years, and what we do is we drill a hole in the ground and put some dynamite in it and blow it off.
ROBERT SIEGEL: Well, how did you go from blowing up jungles in Sumatra looking for oil underground to writing?
GEORGE SAUNDERS: I'd always written all through college, and when I got over there I had the privilege of reading Kerouac for the first time and that, combined with homesickness and so on, I just thought I've got to be a writer, and there's no way I can be corporate and be a writer. Well, in that sort of 22-year-old logic, I was in a jungle four weeks in a row, taking helicopters in and out and that was somehow corporate. But because I was getting paid for it I had to quit and come home and work in a slaughterhouse, so-
ROBERT SIEGEL: You came home and worked in a slaughterhouse.
GEORGE SAUNDERS: I did.
ROBERT SIEGEL: What did you do in a slaughterhouse?
GEORGE SAUNDERS: I was a knuckle puller, actually.
ROBERT SIEGEL: A knuckle puller.
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Yes, a knuckle puller. It's just as pleasant as it sounds. A huge- looks like a chicken leg - of course it's not a chicken leg - it comes in on hooks, and you and your peer group follow it around in your smocks, in this 30-degree room, ripping and tearing at it in a very energetic way. And what you do is, eventually you get this thing about the size of a toaster and you fling it across the room into a sort of conveyer belt.
ROBERT SIEGEL: I mean, you went from planting dynamite in the ground and to blowing up the jungle floor to this work, and I mean, these both kind of, you know, there's some violence to both these activities.
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Well, I've always been very careful about my career path. [laughter] No, I think at that time I had the idea that a writer compiled a writer's resume, so he did manly things. And since there were no wars on at the time, I went through this exercise of, you know, doing these different things. And it had- it was good but it had the opposite- or a different effect. I thought that I would write the great slaughterhouse novel or the great Asian novel, or so on. But, in fact, I didn't write about any of those things, and I think what those things did is gave me the courage to exaggerate. In other words, if I want to take a certain propensity in human beings and exaggerate it I feel like I've seen enough that I can do that without being scoffed at.
ROBERT SIEGEL: There's a scene in 'Bounty' that I'd like you to read for us, which is when the narrator, who is in the slave states of this future America, is out West and a shepherd named Ventor [sp] buys him, along with a few others flaweds and then sits with his slaves he's just purchased and talks to them.
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Attention all. What I usually like to do is hold a brief orientation session to get us all on the wave length. Any objections? Is this a good time for it? Great. Then let's begin with principle number one - I trust you. I'm not going to treat you like a slave and I don't expect you to act like one, not that I think for a minute that you would. Second principle - my sheep are your sheep. I realize that without you, the shepherd, my sheep would tend to wander all over the mountainside being eaten by wolves or the dispossessed. Not that I have anything against the dispossessed, only I don't like them eating my sheep.
Principle three - if we get through the year without a lost sheep it's party time. We'll have couscous and tortilla chips and dancing, and for the main course - what else? - a barbecued sheep. Principles four and five - comfort and dignity. You'll be getting hot meals three times a day, featuring selections from every food group, plus dessert, plus a mint.
'Where exactly are we going?' asked a petulant flawed on my right whose name tag says Leonard. 'Great question, Leonard,' Ventor says. 'You said to yourself, look, I want to know where I'm headed. I like that. Good directiveness. Also, good assertiveness. Perhaps you weren't quite as sensitive to my feelings as you might have been, given that I should have told you where we were headed right off the bat and so therefore feel at the moment a little remiss and inadequate for not having done so, but what the heck. A good growth opportunity for me and a chance for you, Leonard, to make yourself the center of attention, which seems to be one of your issues. Not that I'm in a position to make that judgment, at least not yet. The answer, Leonard, is Southern Utah. Here take a look.'
He passes around snapshots of his ranch and we sit oohing and aahing while holding our lemonades between our knees. It's beautiful. The skies are blue, the cottage is immaculate, the mountain's white. On my soft seat I say a little prayer - let this be real.
ROBERT SIEGEL: George Saunders reading from his novella 'Bounty.' It appears in the April issue of Harper's magazine.
