Sunday, September 30, 2012
The Southeast Review
Thursday, September 13, 2012
Exploring Vollmann’s Labyrinth
There
can be a mesmerizing appeal to novels in which something is slightly off. Frankly,
this could be from the mind of the author, but it's never easy to pin down. This
sounds like it could be a disastrous attraction, but the “off” sense seems to
come out of the writing process more than from any plan the author might have
had (although, who knows--it could as well be an affectation), and rather than detract
from the art of it, this quality usually makes
the novel a more powerful and compelling read. So often, the best
writing is rarely picked dry bones perfect; what is better, to my reading, is the
bold idiosyncrasy of the writer’s mind revealed in the prose.
A cult-ish and high literary writer generally
overlooked by the establishment, and an unclassifiable counterpoint to all of
the squeaky clean novelists--whom usually fail to live up to their hype--is
William T. Vollmann.
Vollmann is poly-literary: essays,
manifestoes, calculi, and novels that he subtitles enigmatically “dreams” that
wildly blur the line between fiction and reality. Vollmann riddles text with
the footnotes and epigraphs of a lifetimes’ reading, which helps deny convenient
demarcations. Notorious for his prodigality, and with a remarkable willingness
for excess, I recall him in an interview talking about how he’s nearly
destroyed his own hands with carpel tunel from his marathon writing labors.
In The Rifles, Vollmann imagines himself as a member of a failed expedition
to find the Northwest Passage that met its tragic end over one hundred and
fifty years ago. Vollmann writes as William the Blind, Captain Subzero, Wm.
Franklin, et al. Vollmann portrays living a parallel existence in two time
periods as he delivers history, critiques of the rampant blood thirsty hunting
culture introduced by the repeating rifle, and personal asides, including an
inadvisable affair with a partially deaf mute Inuit woman.
In one of the gripping chapters of The Rifles is a perfunctory survival
tale that shouldn’t be. This is when Vollmann went to the defunct weather
station at Isachsen on Ellef Ringnes Island near the North Pole with plainly insufficient
cold weather gear and tried to replicate the experience of those in that failed
Northwest Passage expedition. Why Vollmann would have needlessly subjected
himself to an almost suicidal series of decisions that delivers a kind of
campfire tale with shaggy dog proportions seems like nothing less than the
writer trying to prove himself to himself first, and the interested reader,
second. It’s as if he wanted to experience his characters’ ill-fated turns.
Vollmann strives, at all times, to make a virtue of fallibility, with a
survivalist’s indomitable resourcefulness.
The narrative seems to grow
organically and out of its own imperative, and doesn’t feel hemmed and hewed by
needless story boarding or scene peddling. A Vollmann narrative can feel less
like a development than a conflagration, an uncontrolled burn. In a less
confident writer this can come off as stultifying and mannered, and at its worst,
arbitrary. But Vollmann trusts his logorrhea, perhaps, an obsessive pursuit of
specific, charged detail.
Often defying logic in terms of straight
ahead narrative, his novels are mythmaking in their self-references and staggering
in their encyclopedic breadth. Some of his thousand pages plus tomes with their
dense pages often makes them prohibitive to casual reading, but for the welcome
they offer once you are fully engaged with it.
Vollmann the artist illustrates his
texts with distinctive pen and ink sketches that reveal a skilled and highly
idiosyncratic translation of the world that map, diagram and render talismanic
and symbolic self-portraits.
Vollmann’s crackling sentences are
of an honest writer seemingly without peer, seeing a world he has as much chosen
as made, through an idealistic lens he wishes to translate faithfully. Vollmann
makes his poetry incidental, and he’s not self-conscious about it, as in this
passage from The Rifles: “He had to
wear his headlamp, and it gleamed cheerlessly ahead, reflecting his own black
shape in the glass of dead exit signs so that some monster was always coming
toward him.”
Once venturing into the Vollmann
labyrinth, it is, to me, a very comforting place. He makes no apologies for his
investigations and presents himself as the steadfast hero in his formidable
travels. His approach is that the “world is my world (and you are welcome to come along)", with frequent ill-advised border crossings, side trips and harrowing misadventures.
The apparent faith Vollmann puts in
his fellow beings reveals a rare and magnanimous character, burdened by avid
appreciation for the underappreciated of humanity. Though he is presenting what
at times seems to be a persona, as a writer he doesn’t seem any less reliable
because of it. Vollmann makes no excuses for his predilections, and out-quirks
his contemporaries who have got to be thinking: any self-respecting writer
would avoid such a profile or risk being labeled a narcissist. To quote Vollmann
in the collection of writings, Expelled
from Eden: “It is not so hard to be honest, merely a little embarrassing.” Vollmann
is often brave, foolish, bawdy and a touch unsettling, but I never question his
sincerity. He’s a writer I am grateful to, and read with as much awe as deliberation.
But his writing style, inspiring in its risks, often reminds me of the virtue
in being passionate, and in particular, how as a writer of vital things one
should grasp how big a waste of time it is to worry about what anyone thinks of
you. How as a writer of vital things one should trust in their inspirations,
however unusual.
Labels:
Art of the Novel,
book reviews,
The Rifles,
William T. Vollmann,
writing
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