Welcome my son,
Welcome, to the Machine.
Where have you been?
That's all right we know where you've been.
You've been in the pipeline, filling in time
Provided with toys and scrounging for boys.
Welcome my Son
Welcome, to the Machine
What did you dream?
That's all right we told you what to dream.
George Saunders' short story Jon is a refreshing attack on Corporate commercialism. It is primarily effective due to the structure of it's prose/narrative: It's told from the perspective of a cog (Jon), who speaks in a somewhat disjunct dialect filled with references to specific commercials. Instead of using a super omniscient voice that is able to comment on various aspects of "The Man" from a distant point of safety, the story is told by someone with a limited perspective and whose personal well being is very much tied to the system he is describing.
Though it is a refreshing read, I'm not sure how effective the story was in attacking corporate commercialism. That might be okay, because I don't think that's the only thing the story is trying to do. But it is worth noting how the story may fall short.
The reason that I don't think Jon works very well as a satire (=using exaggeration to bring certain vices to light) is because the story is almost too exaggerated. The story begins to transcend into science fiction, and this leaves less of an impact on me, because I don't feel as threatened by a world that's so different, even if that exaggeration is only being used to say something very real about our current world. I don't have chips in my head, I can go out and examine the flowers whenever I want to, I speak pretty good English. I don't really relate to Jon. Maybe that's because the Man is doing his job--if he's doing his job, I shouldn't relate to Jon, should I?--, but that can't be assumed. Assuming I don't relate to Jon because I'm in a situation similar to Jon (having the wool pulled over my eyes, so to speak) because it fits a fun narrative is bordering on paranoia.
I think Jon does do some very good things though. I think it is very funny... the prose style really lends itself to humor, and there were times that I was legitimately laughing at things Jon would say, comparisons to commercials he would make, etc. Jon also functions as a good, if somewhat predictable love story. It was interesting to see the classic "free-bird" dynamic (girl/guy "x" values the relationship but values freedom more, and ultimately has to leave even though it pains them, to chase a future somewhere else) played out in this unique setting. I also really liked the whole moral/philosophical delima... is it moral to have the baby grow up "outside", where he will be more free but also at a material risk? Or vice versa?
Finally, as I mentioned at the beginning, the story does the best thing a story can do: It's interesting. It was a breeze to read, it sucked you along. It might not leave the biggest emotional impact on me, but it was a fun read that still brought up plenty of thought-provoking questions. And that's something.
Being "too exaggerated" is one of my biggest complaints about this collection of short stories. I like a lot of the things Saunders has to say and I found the stories humorous and effective. However, I read this entire book cover to cover on an airplane last week and I thought as a whole, this book is extremely heavy-handed. More often than not I felt like Saunders was yelling the message he was trying to convey in my face.
ReplyDeleteI also agree that "Jon" was also really exaggerated, to a point that it's world stopped impacting me in terms of meaning of commercialism; when you said that it almost seemed like a science fiction, I realized that that's precisely how I felt too. But if you look at "Jon" from a wider perspective (ignoring what it may potentially be saying about consumer culture), it's certainly an intriguing story in a wildly different setting, with other questions tossed in, such as questions about the narrative voice.
ReplyDeleteIt's an unusual thing to say about a first-person story, but I'm not sure "relating" to Jon is really the aim here. Remember Saunders's own account of the origins of this story, in that student comment about Kafka that flipped his wig, as a kind of imaginative investigation into the question of how someone could come to talk that way. In Jon, we see a guy who could potentially be relateable, lying here in his Privacy Tarp, tempted to disobey the adults' strictures against violating rules about boys and girls, but everything else about his world is radically different, in terms of what we take to be its practical constraints.
ReplyDeleteI think of it more as a worst-case hypothetical: if "kids today" have their brains so fully shaped by advertising, what about a kid whose mind was literally *only* comprised of advertising?