William Vollmann

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, September 27, 2003
Novelist's New Math: A Calculus of Violence
By EMILY EAKIN

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The novelist William T. Vollmann lowered his 
pistol, removed his hearing protectors and hobbled across the dusty 
shooting yard to assess the damage.

What he saw pleased him. Despite his handicaps — a broken pelvis and a 
brain addled by massive doses of Percoset and Vicodin — his aim had been 
true.

"I got one bull's eye," he exclaimed in delight, bending down in the 
dirt amid the litter of spent brass shells to inspect a paper target 
tacked to a piece of bullet-pocked plywood.

He smiled encouragingly at the reporter hovering by his side. "Why don't 
you load up the 9, and you can plink away?"

In Mr. Vollmann's view, an opportunity to legally discharge a firearm is 
not something to pass up. Even crutches, painkillers and broken bones — 
a result of being hit by a car while riding his bike near his home here 
in July — are no reason to abstain.

"Shooting really is the quintessentially American experience," he 
explained. "I'm really sorry for people in other countries who can't do 
this."

Such remarks would seem in keeping with his public image as America's 
leading literary renegade. After all, over the last decade and a half, 
Mr. Vollmann, 44, has pumped out thousands of pages of dark, difficult, 
scatological prose rife with all manner of violence and degradation. 
Thanks to books like "Whores for Gloria," "The Rainbow Stories" and 
nearly a dozen other titles, he has earned a cult following and 
comparisons to both Thomas Pynchon and Céline.

His fascination with prostitutes, pimps, drug addicts and skinheads is 
legendary. As are his research methods. His quest for authenticity has 
led him to prowl war zones and bad neighborhoods, to sleep with 
streetwalkers, to smoke crack with junkies and to endure grueling 
physical ordeals.

For "The Rifles" (1994), one of a series of novelistic treatments of 
episodes from American history, he tried to relive the dark final days 
of the 19th-century explorer Sir John Franklin, who died in the Arctic 
Circle while searching for the Northwest Passage. Mr. Vollmann spent two 
weeks alone at an abandoned Canadian weather station at the magnetic 
North Pole, suffering from hypothermia, frostbite and hallucinations 
from the lack of sleep.

But his enthusiasm for guns, it turns out, owes more to moral conviction 
than literary curiosity. It is a direct result, Mr. Vollmann says, of 
the research he undertook for his latest work: "Rising Up and Rising 
Down," a 3,000-page meditation on the ethics of violence.

The book, which will be published in seven volumes by McSweeney's in 
October (and in abridged form by Ecco next year), took him 23 years to 
write. A dense, meandering, amalgam of historical analysis, contemporary 
case studies, anecdotes, essays, theory, charts, graphs, photographs and 
drawings, it is Mr. Vollmann's attempt to bring definitive resolution to 
a conundrum that has preoccupied generations of thinkers: under what 
conditions can violence be justified?

(clip)

In a chapter called "Defense of Race and Culture," Mr. Vollmann takes on 
John Brown, the violent abolitionist hanged for raiding the federal 
arsenal at Harpers Ferry in 1859. Regarded by many as a saintly 
crusader, Brown, Mr. Vollmann argues, was also a murderer, who had his 
men drag five unarmed, pro-slavery men from their homes near 
Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas and kill them. "How much does it matter 
that John Brown inspires loyalty and love, and that his cause is just?" 
Mr. Vollmann writes. He also "did bad things to bad men. . . . He dared 
to presume, as Martin Luther King came dangerously near doing, that the 
ends justify the means. For Pottawatomie alone I think he deserved to 
hang."

From each of these case studies, Mr. Vollmann tries to derive an 
objective moral lesson. From the example of John Brown he concludes that 
"violent defense of race and culture is justified" in five 
circumstances, including "when it is simple imminent physical defense of 
self or others in response to an attack passed primarily or solely on 
affiliation."

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/27/books/27VOLL.html


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