The Aesthetic of Excess

Vollmann, after all, has never been a measured writer; rather, his is an aesthetic of excess, if anything. He aspires to a kind of unified field theory of human existence in which history and fiction merge with memory, myth and reportage. Yes, his books sprawl, unapologetically, but they’re also breathtakingly risky, full of ideas and images no one else would dare address. For a certain kind of reader, this is his appeal, the sheer audaciousness of his imagination, his erudition, the connections that he brings to bear. It’s not just his writing, but the experiences that inform it. To research The Rifles — which describes, in part, the unsuccessful attempt by British explorer Sir John Franklin to find the Northwest Passage — Vollmann spent two weeks alone at an abandoned weather station in the Arctic Circle, where he almost froze to death. In 1994, he nearly died outside Sarajevo, when a sniper shot up the car in which he was riding, killing his two traveling companions. To be fair, there’s an edge of provocation to many of his endeavors: his propensity to pal around with prostitutes and crackheads, for one thing, which has inspired much of his fiction, from The Rainbow Stories to Whores for Gloria to The Royal Family. But if this suggests an uncomfortable air of voyeurism — “in his clumsier moments,” Lily Burana once wrote, “his fascination with prostitutes and miscellaneous thuggy types seems repellent, the obtuse ramblings of a tragedy tourist” — more often, he brings a ruthlessly uninflected eye to the proceedings, evoking his subjects’ humanity and degradation all at once. “People would be better off,” Vollmann has said, “if they realized that their own particular world is not privileged. Everyone’s world is no more and no less important than anyone else’s. To have as many worlds as possible that are invested with interest or meaning is a way of making that point. I’ve gradually begun to see that I can use even my footnotes and glossaries and other sorts of materials to create some of this sense.”

Even by Vollmann’s own expansive standards, Rising Up and Rising Down is something of a great leap forward — or, more accurately, an extension, a connective fiber, a lens that refracts new light on his career. On the most basic level, that’s because the idea for it predates everything else Vollmann has written; he first began to feel around the edges of the project more than 20 years ago while still an undergraduate at Cornell. “When I was in college,” he explains, “I was interested in the anti-nuclear movement. There were extremely dire predictions about nuclear power and its effects, and I was haunted by the specter of environmental disaster.” In 1980, he took part in a protest at a nuclear power plant in Seabrook, New Hampshire, an experience that changed his whole idea of engagement, if only for what he came to see as the futility of the act. “It was grandiose,” Vollmann recalls, “ridiculous. We tried to blockade the plant, but we ran up against the organized violence of the state of New Hampshire in the form of the National Guard. So the protest failed, but I began to think: If things were really this dire, could violence be justified? How would it be measured? If the plant could kill a hundred thousand people, was it okay to kill 90,000 to stop it? Was there some kind of proportion one might apply?”

This concept of proportion is essential to Rising Up and Rising Down, the bedrock on which the work is built. For Vollmann, however, the idea developed slowly, rising up and rising down itself. After Seabrook, he decided to write an environmental manifesto. “At the time,” he says, “my position was more extreme than Earth First! I believed that, in defense of Earth, it was acceptable to take human life.” Then came a trip to Afghanistan, where Vollmann traveled in the wake of the Soviet invasion, an experience recounted in An Afghanistan Picture Show. Much has been made of the similarities between An Afghanistan Picture Show and Rising Up and Rising Down; they are Vollmann’s only overt works of nonfiction, and both deal with extremes of human experience, what happens when people get pushed to the edge. But actually, they’re less of a piece with each other than representative of Vollmann’s entire oeuvre. There’s little doubt, after all, that his environmental activism led to the apocalyptic fantasia of You Bright and Risen Angels; indeed, from the Jesuits of Fathers and Crows, whose faith is steeped in blood and torture, to the 55 stories of The Atlas, a 1996 collection that covers similar territory to Rising Up and Rising Down, Vollmann has always relied on the stuff of history for the substance of his fiction, to the point where it’s often difficult to distinguish between the two. As such, it’s no real stretch for him to write, as he does here, about Clausewitz, Joan of Arc, or Montezuma, let alone John Brown, who, Vollmann argues, “deserved to hang” for orchestrating the unprovoked murders of five Kansans at Pottawatomie Creek — pro-slavery though they were. Brown, in fact, is nothing if not a prototypical Vollmann character: a visionary, obsessed, touched by destiny, spiraling along the moral edge. Recast him a little, and he could be a figure out of Seven Dreams.