I've just started getting into the Library of America's recent release of John Cheever's collected short stories, and recently acquired works by Iris Murdoch, Edward Whittemore, Tayeb Salih, John Millington Synge and William Trevor are patiently awaiting my attention. And yet here goes William T. Vollmann again with another massive offering that will swallow up yet more bookshelf space and occupy significant chunks of my reading time. And his topic of choice happens to concern a region of the country that lies practically just beyond my backyard and has been a topic of no little fascination since I relocated to the West Coast - the Imperial Valley. So, I happily submit, singing in my chains like the sea, etc. etc.
Vollmann, for the uninitiated, is a writer of considerable abilities, astounding reach, staggering ambitions and seemingly inexhaustible effort. The aspect of his writing which seems to attract the most attention is his sheer output, both in terms of separate volumes and word count. His planned seven-volume Dreams series, which investigates different times and places in North American history concerning native-and-settler interactions, is still three volumes away from completion yet already tops 2,900 pages. His 2005 National Book Award Winner Europe Central weighed in at over 800 pages. And perhaps his signal achievement was an audacious seven-volume treatise on violence, 2003's Rising Up and Rising Down - 3,352 pages in all, gloriously brought to fruition courtesy of the good folks at McSweeney's (this original edition was published in a limited run that has since sold out, with a well-meaning but hopelessly incomplete abridged version still available from Ecco Press).
Clearly, then, any discussion about Vollmann must partially deal with the sheer weight of his published work. One could argue that, like similarly prolific artists, such as Anthony Braxton or Steve Lacy, his output does his craft a disservice - even admirers increasingly find it difficult to keep up, and any attempt at true familiarity with Vollmann's work is fast becoming impossible for the scholar and amateur alike. And many commentators insist that Vollmann's verbiage is consistently excessive and unnecessary, that even his best works are marred by long stretches of bewilderingly bad or convoluted prose.
For reasons that continue to baffle me, I don't agree. While I long ago moved beyond the rather adolescent and almost exclusively male concept that (in literature / art, at least) heft and size automatically deserve admiration and suggest profundity, I remain impressed by any individual willing to tackle massive subjects and treat them with the seriousness and detail they deserve. In an age dominated by sound bites and Twitter - an era in which to speak for more than a few seconds on any topic is to run the risk of being cut off by a yawn or a commercial break - I applaud Vollmann's refusal to dumb down or hurry along. 1,300 pages devoted to one of the bleakest, hottest, flattest and emptiest sections of the country may strike some as absurd. I find it to be rather appropriate.
In fact, I tend to view Vollmann as representing a far different literary approach from many of his contemporaries in the literary fiction and postmodern world. To my way of thinking, Vollmann is less a writer of fiction and non-fiction and more a throwback to those writers of the pre-novelistic age, in which authors were expected to assemble massive collections of style, thought, opinion and whimsy. Rising Up and Rising Down reminded me not of scholarly histories by the likes of Edward Gibbon (whose six-edition The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was used more than once as a critical counterpoint to Vollmann's offering) but more of something like Robert Burton's nearly unclassifiable The Anatomy of Melancholy, a 1,300 page tome from 1621 that purported to investigate, from top to bottom, the concept of melancholy and humanity's attempts to describe and understand it, both scientifically and artistically. The work is maddening, obtuse, overlong, eccentric and utterly wonderful. Any attempt to pigeonhole it would fail. And so it is with much of Vollmann's work - part fiction, part reportage, part armchair philosophy, part Baedeker.
My interest in Imperial stems partly from my own exploration of the desert lowlands lying between San Diego and the Arizona border, an area boasting one of the richest agricultural regions in the nation, a rather porous border in which Mexican and American culture mingle in uncomfortable ways, an accidental inland sea that grows more saline with each passing day, and a massive set of sand dunes that served as the planet of Tatooine in a certain popular film of the 1970s. Last night, I attended a public lecture and book signing engagement at Warwick's bookstore in La Jolla for the release of Imperial, and was pleased to see that the event attracted a large crowd. Vollmann didn't speak for long, but took many questions and chatted animatedly and engagingly with the crowd while signing copies of the book (along with earlier works that numerous fans brought along, including one industrious fellow who carried his entire collection of Rising Up and Rising Down in a Trader Joe's shopping bag). The crowd was a little genteel for Vollmann's tastes, I suspect, although the man is so polite and friendly that nobody was the wiser (although I think he flinched as much as I did when one exceedingly-coiffed La Jolla matron asked how on earth he could claim to enjoy visiting Imperial County more than San Diego) (related side note: the very nice woman next to me at one point asked if I knew where Vollmann lived, and when I told her "Sacramento," she repeated the name several times out loud in a shocked and almost offended tone, as if the sheer audacity of anybody living in such a place boggled her mind). Somebody else asked Vollmann if he had found anything positive or uplifting to write about the Imperial Valley - this after he had gone on at length on the beauty of the desert nighttime skies, the warmness of the people, the devotion to family and work, and the glory of the many hidden dive bars sprinkled across Calexico and Mexicali.
While signing my book and adding one of his trademark doodles, Vollmann asked me what other books I was reading, and when I told him I'd just finished Frank Norris' 1899 McTeague, his face lit up and he told me what an odd and unsettling work it was. "It actually reminds me a bit of Blue Velvet," he said, and I realized how right he was, especially in the way the work begins in an almost cliched atmosphere of goodness and decency before devolving into utter despair and horror. He then invited me to stick around after the book signing to have a drink or two across the street. I wasn't about to say no.
About a dozen of us made our way down the quickly emptying streets of La Jolla in search of any drinking establishment open past 9:30. There aren't many in this part of town. We eventually wandered into Jose's Court Room, hardly a dive bar, but capable of housing larger groups. Vollmann kindly asked my opinion on local beers as we walked along, and we both expressed our enthusiasm for IPAs. Alas, none were on tap that night at Jose's, and when Vollmann asked the bartender for the darkest beer they had, the answer came back Guinness, in a bottle. The man didn't flinch. He asked us thoughtful questions about books we were reading, talked of his past visits to Sarajevo and the recent re-opening of their destroyed national library (at which he was present and spoke), spoke briefly of his upcoming fifth volume in the Dreams series, and showed admirable restraint and politeness while listening to a rather loud and uninteresting woman in the later stages of inebriation talk about herself.
In addition to sharing a drink with one of my favorite living authors, I was also pleased to make the acquaintances of several like-minded individuals, Vollmann fans all and with multiple interests dovetailing with my own. We all agreed that San Diego needed to host more speaking engagements of interesting contemporary authors, and at one time or another we all mused on the area's rapidly declining record store and book store scene.
After finishing his Guinness, Vollmann excused himself, apologizing that he needed to be in Seattle for another appearance tomorrow. I found myself remarking to several others how pleasant it was to meet an individual one admired and find them to be even more approachable and genuine than suspected. Like that fantastic evening several years ago in New York, when Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon and Jim O'Rourke hung out at my table before taking the stage at Tonic, the humble qualities and complete lack of celebrity bullshit from individuals I consider to be giants is a wonderful and life-affirming thing. It makes one proud to seek meaning in life through art.
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1 comment:
fucking awesome.
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