The Aesthetic of Excess

In almost every way that matters, McSweeney’s and Rising Up and Rising Down represent the perfect match of publisher and work. Each stands willfully adjacent to the mainstream; each aspires to push the limits of what literature can do. Eggers, in fact, has labeled Rising Up and Rising Downthe quintessential McSweeney’s project, both because of what it offers and the logistics of bringing it out. “McSweeney’s,” he explains, “like a lot of small publishers, can take on seemingly unpublishable projects because we have little overhead and we’re used to losing money. We also have a lot of volunteer help.” Relying almost entirely on interns, Eggers and Eli Horowitz took a guerrilla approach to the manuscript, farming out hundred-page chunks to researchers who descended on Bay Area libraries to check Vollmann’s voluminous citations, often hiding sources in the stacks so they could find them on succeeding days. Meanwhile, Horowitz dismantled each of Rising Up and Rising Down’s more than 70 chapters to insure that Vollmann’s logic held. Occasionally, the hydra-headed nature of the process led to problems, with pictures getting lost or blocks of text misplaced. “It was a stretch for all parties concerned,” Vollmann says wryly, “including me. Dave’s system — which is to have teams of unpaid kids — meant that all kinds of things were not done until the last minute because there are so many tentacles that you can’t keep track.” Ultimately, however, such a system was essential, as was Vollmann’s willingness to forgo his advance in favor of profit sharing on the back end. As Eggers notes, “I think it’s a book many publishers wanted to publish, and a lot of people recognize how important it and Vollmann is, but I think with the math larger companies have to adhere to, they’d have to charge about $450 for the set of books, as opposed to the $120 we were able to charge for it. That’s the big difference — our low overhead and the ability to be more flexible with the business plan . . . [B]ecause we don’t really have to factor in profits for shareholders, et cetera, we can experiment a little more.”

Eggers is talking about a new publishing model, a strategy for doing business that is flexible, fluid, unbound by the modalities of the past. On a different level, that’s what Vollmann is up to also, taking a subject like violence and getting us to look at it anew. Perhaps the most striking aspect of Rising Up and Rising Down is its staunchly anti-ideological ethic, the way Vollmann asks us to deconstruct our deepest preconceptions and what they mean. His discussion of Mahatma Gandhi, for instance, although largely admiring, concludes that the Indian leader was naive for his unyielding adherence to nonviolence in every circumstance, whereas his account of New York subway gunman Bernhard Goetz — who in 1984 shot four black teenagers he claimed had threatened him with sharpened screwdrivers — invokes The Babylonian Talmud (“If a man has come to kill you, anticipate him by killing him!”) to support Goetz’s right to defend himself. For Vollmann, the ultimate moral compass point is self-preservation; as he says, with only a trace of humor, “Nobody would blame a Nazi war criminal for trying to save his own skin.” In the most extreme situations, this extends even to suicide, which at times “offers the only way to freedom,” the ultimate act of self-defense. To illustrate the concept, Vollmann cites a number of examples, from the mass suicide of Jewish defenders at Masada to those of officials in “atom-bombed, surrendered Japan,” who chose “to die responsibly, as it were, at their posts.” What’s remarkable about these arguments is the extent to which they eschew emotion — which, Vollmann believes, only encourages unexamined doctrines and beliefs. Even his language is rigorously analytical: “Based on my presuppositions about the rights of the self,” he writes, “my moral calculus advocates that suicide is permissible whenever uncoerced.”

No matter where you stand on the ideological spectrum, it can be unsettling to see Bernhard Goetz juxtaposed with a figure like Gandhi, or, for that matter, suicide reconfigured as a form of self-defense. Such concepts are troublesome, uncomfortable and raise a lot of questions, constantly forcing us to reassess our engagement with the book. This, however, is part of the purpose, especially if you disagree with Vollmann (as I do in regard to Goetz): to challenge our assumptions, to make us reconsider what we think we know. Such a stance has long marked Vollmann as a writer; his first novel, You Bright and Risen Angels, written in his early 20s, is a 630-page allegory about a war between insects and humankind for world domination. In less than a decade following its 1987 publication, he cranked out nine additional books, of which none are as imposing as Seven Dreams, a projected cycle of seven novels — to this point, only The Ice-Shirt, Fathers and Crows, The Rifles and Argall have been published — that evoke a “Symbolic History” of North America, built around the corruption of traditional lifestyles by European explorers, beginning with the Norsemen who visited Greenland a thousand years ago. In recent years, Vollmann has slowed somewhat; including Rising Up and Rising Down, he’s only published three new works since 1996, although the shortest is 746 pages long. Still, a common criticism is that he’d be a better writer (read: more measured) if he published less, a true enough statement, but one that is entirely beside the point.