Why I Wrote Phil
An Exclusive Essay for Amazon.com
By George Saunders
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My stories begin with some kernel of interest--a phrase, an idea, a
bit of dialogue, a purposely limiting conceptual framework. From there
I try to have as little idea as possible of the shape or meaning of
the story. I just try, intuitively, to go in the most lively,
interesting, true direction, trusting that, if I do, the story will
take on a shape and a meaning more interesting and authentic than I
could have planned for it. It's sort of a seed crystal approach: start
with something small and wait for it to grow outwards, naturally, on
its own, concept-free, assuming that if the story is compelling line-
by-line, then theme, character, politics, etc. will all take care of
themselves.
The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil began with a challenge from my
friend, the illustrator Lane Smith, who suggested I write a story in
which all the characters were abstract shapes. In the process, I found
myself writing, "Once there was a country that was too small for all
its inhabitants to fit inside at once." Soon the story was going off
in an unexpected direction, and was becoming that rare and not-so-
sought-after thing, a kid's story about genocide. The characters
evolved from abstract shapes to beings I thought of as Conglomerates,
composed of flesh and machine parts and vegetative portions. One
group, led by Phil, was soon trying to eliminate the other group, and
Phil, talking in Stalinist rants whenever his brain fell off, was
consolidating his power a l=E1 Hitler, surrounding himself with brown-
nosing Advisors, brainless needy henchman, and groveling media
spokespersons, and then murdering the opposition in gruesome ways.
Needless to say, all hope for marketing tie-ins vanished. Still, I was
interested, and wanted to see how things would turn out. There was a
clash of tones (Bullwinklesque) and content (slaughter) that intrigued
me for some reason, and also called to mind our current cultural
moment, when public language--reduced, dumbed-down, slogan-drenched,
clich=E9-ridden--seems created to under-describe horror and suffering,
and bureaucratize massacre.
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"Soon the story was going off in an unexpected direction, and was
becoming that rare and not-so-sought-after thing, a kid's story about
genocide." --George Saunders
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To me, the story came to be about the human tendency to continuously
divide the world into dualities, and, soon after, cast one's lot in
with one side of the duality and begin energetically trying to
eliminate the other. When writing in this fabulist mode, I try to
avoid a specific referrent and instead rotate various referrents in
and out, hoping to locate some seed commonality; in this case, some
Greatest Common Denominator for tyrants. I had in mind, at various
times, Rwanda, Bosnia, the Holocaust and, because the above-described
method of composition sometimes leaves a story becalmed or confused
for long stretches of time (this one took, finally, five years to
finish, swelling up to over 300 pages, then back down), Islamic
fundamentalism, the war on terror, the invasion of Iraq, red states
vs. blue states, Abu Ghraib, Shia vi. Sunni, as well as smaller, more
localized examples of Us vs. Them, especially the one that takes place
entirely in one's mind, where the thinker identifies so strongly with
one set of ideas, that he pretends other, contradictory ideas don't
exist, and when they show themselves, tries to obliterate them, afraid
of the complexity and ambiguity these force upon him.
In Phil himself I saw the embodiment of our tendency to turn our
enemies into objects, so that we can then guiltlessly destroy them.
Happiness, in PhilWorld, consists of the total elimination of the
contradictory, the nuanced, the too-complicated-to-decide-at-this-
time. In the end, for me anyway, the book came to be about the way in
which the human ego seeks comfort in the oversimplification of the
world and the eradication of that which it perceives as Other. We all
have a bit of Phil in us, and maybe (though the part of me that
believes stories need to have a Purpose) seeing someone who is all
Phil, might help us recognize our own Philness when it manifests, and
nip it in the bud.
But actually this is all after-the-fact conceptual window-dressing.
What I hope for this book is simply that it entertains, using the old
fashioned story-telling virtues: surprising form, charged language,
humor, some truth there amid the wackiness. I hope this alternate
world flares up in the reader's mind for a time, and thereafter
reappears every now and then, like a vivid dream the reader once had,
or, you know, a nightmare, of which he or she is oddly fond.
George Saunders is the author of two collections, CivilWarLand in Bad
Decline and Pastoralia. He teaches in the Syracuse University Creative
Writing program.
By George Saunders
The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil
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Pastoralia
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CivilWarLand in Bad Decline
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The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip
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