Category / Vollmann, William

by Edward Champion

Freedom’s Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose

An interesting exchange between Vollmann and Kate Braverman: “If freedom means anything, it’s about being repulsive as well as being able to do flower paintings. I believe that we have to focus on the other. I’m not saying pedophilia is right. But I imagined someone who would be, by our culture’s standards, the most vile and repulsive character, worse than Osama bin Laden. But let’s make him wise and a guide or bridge to the Queen. And it’s through somebody like that Tyler gains entrance to the Queen. He endures humiliation and insult from Dan Smooth. That’s the price he pays. In so many ways, this novel is about degradation. One of the questions I’ve often had is, when does self-actualization end and degradation begin? What does it really mean if we’re going to try to be ourselves? We don’t want to be conformists. We don’t want to follow social conventions, but how far do we want to take that?”

(Thanks, D!)

[UPDATE: Mr. Hogan has discovered the complete version of the interview.]

by Edward Champion

The Red Badge of Experiential Courage

Ocracoke Post compares Vollmann and Stephen Crane, noting that their respective work falls into adventure journalism. J.M. Tyree offers some fascinating comparisons (both authors were attracted to prostitutes in their early fiction), pointing out that the books that critics have singled out “historical fiction” as their greatest accomplishments (Europe Central and The Red Badge of Courage).

I’d venture one further comparison. Both authors plunged themselves hard into exotic settings before writing about them. And yet with these two books, one might argue that they are the most imagined. Vollmann, of course, did not observe World War II, save through the copious books at his disposal. Crane never observed a single battle.

In fact, what makes EC such an interesting departure from previous Vollmann novels is the way that EC‘s “narrator as guide,” a stylistic device found to varying degrees in nearly all of Vollmann’s work, is even more imagined this time around. The “narrator” often serves as a proletariat who seems to know all the inside and intimate dirt about top Party officials and the like, often referring to the reader as “comrade.”

It would seem that the early real-world obsessions that both Vollmann and Crane essentially gave them license to invent the world of danger in their later ficiton.

by Edward Champion

Recategorization

The word sounds vaguely Orwellian, reminiscent of a major shift in current events. But it is necessary, given that categorizing the content here is the only way that anyone, least of all myself, can make sense of it all.

As of today, I’ve written around 2,600 posts – 1,600 posts which remain uncategorized. For any other blogger, this may seem a ridiculous sum to collate into a taxonomy. But since I’m known to be somewhat zealous and anal about setting my ducks in a row, and since the categories offer a valuable method of tracking the development of my thoughts (such as they are) and associations, it has become essential for me to get them all set up once and for all during the first quarter of 2006. (I should note that this is part of a general self-imposed regimen to get my shit together. I still consider myself to be a very lazy man, but then the indolence standard I apply is comparable to 19th century labor.) It helps immensely that WordPress 2.0, with its DHTML “Add” box, has made it especially easy to categorize things. And 1,600 posts, at 20 posts to recategorize a day, is not as arduous a figure as one might expect.

My goal then is to provide a kind of uber-meta context for everything so that readers can participate more fully in the discussions and call me on my shit if I end up striking the same chord far too many times. A mini-Wikipedia with more ruthless standards, if you will. I’m hoping that some of the topics and obsessions here can flesh out into something more concrete, possibly becoming entirely new entities separate from this blog. And for the extremely bored reader determined to sift through the 2,600 or so posts (at an average of 500 words per post, that adds up to easily over a million words I’ve written here in the past two years, a tally that truly astonishes me), I’ve added little updates and annotations noting changes in information that seem pertinent or slightly entertaining.

All this probably means nothing to 99.99% of you. But I suppose what pushed me over the edge was some email correspondence with a few people about Peter Greenaway’s Tulse Luper project. Apparently, I’m the only Yank excited about it, much less aware of it, even if I can’t get my hands on any of the films in question. What I admire greatly about Greenaway’s project is the way that he has dared to throw information out there in an uncompromising way and that perhaps only he and a few people will understand it. Much like the novelist William T. Vollmann, Greenaway is one of the few prolific artistic visionaries out there producing a disparate body of work that grad students and artistic appreciators will spend years sifting through long after Greenaway’s death.

While I wouldn’t dare put myself or these efforts in the same pantheon as Vollmann or Greenaway, I am nevertheless hoping that this blog, which I apparently spend more time on than I realize, can serve a similar purpose. For the past two years, I have been working on various projects (limitless false starts and hundreds of pages of dialogue that have been painfully written and painfully thrown away), hoping that I can find a way of applying the brio that seems to come naturally here to that form. If experience serves as a guide, hard diligence and an open mind eventually leads me closer to the direction I need to be wandering in.

Recategorization then is partly a personal quest, to see exactly how frequently I am writing about certain topics and to drop kick the diffidence I apply to others and pursue them further. Only an information-obsessed geek will understand this impulse. But hopefully a few readers might find something of interest along the way.

by Edward Champion

Vollmann’s Favorite Books

Here is a list of the best books that Vollmann has ever read (as reported in “Something to Die For,” The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993, Vol 13, Issue 2, p. 25):

Tadeusz Konwicki, A Dreambook for Our Time
Lady Murasaki, The Tale of Genji
Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
Lautreamont, Maldoror
Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate
Tolstoy, War and Peace
Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country
Hemingway, Islands in the Stream
The Poetic Edda
The tales of Chekhov
The tales of Hawthorne
Njal’s Saga
Sigrid Unset, Kristin Lavransdatter
Melville, The Piazza Tales
London, Martin Eden
Julio Cortazar, Hopscotch
The poems of Emily Dickinson
Faulkner, Pylon and The Sound and the Fury
Homer, the Odyssey and the Iliad
Nikos Kazantzakis, The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel
Heidegger, Being and Time
Poe, The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym
Pushkin, Eugene Onegin
Kobo Abe, The Woman in the Dunes
Blake, Songs of Experience and Experience
Gyorgi Konrad, The Loser
Issac B. Singer, The Family Moskas
Bruno Schultz, The Street of Crocodiles
Malraux, Anti-Memoirs
The poems of Lorca
The poems of Mandelstam
Ovid’s Metamorphoses
The tales of D.H. Lawrence
T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Ivan Ilich, Tools for Conviviality
Mishima, the Sea of Fertility tetraology
Kimon Nicolaides, The Natural Way to Draw
The poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins
Jane Smiley, The Greenlanders

Vollmann then writes:

Doubtless some people will want to complain about the women, blacks, reds, whites, blues and greens I left out, but I don’t really give a damn.

The beauty in these books would flourish more widely if the following social changes were made:

1. Abolish television, because it has no reverence for time.

2. Abolish the automobile, because it has no reverence for space.

3. Make citizenship contingent on literacy in every sense. Thus, politicians who do not write every word of their speeches should be thrown out of office in disgrace. Writers who require editors to make their books “good” should be depublished.

4. Teach reverence for all beauty, including that of the word.