The Aesthetic of Excess

If all this sounds a bit dense, a bit difficult, perhaps that’s unavoidable — this is a work of theory, after all. And yet, as Eli Horowitz points out, “The book is way more beautiful than it has any cause to be.” As for why that is, it has everything to do with Vollmann’s personality, his iconoclasm, his refusal to fit the categories of conventional culture on any terms other than his own. Although he’s fiercely libertarian, critics on the left are wary of him, if only for his fascination with prostitutes and guns. Readers on the right, by contrast, distrust his excesses, his interest in the darker corners of experience, his willingness to conflate what they see as irreconcilable influences, from Thomas Aquinas to the Marquis de Sade.

In Vollmann’s view, though, if we are to have any hope of understanding our circumstances, we must engage them as dispassionately as possible, with neither sentiment nor cant. That’s not to say such understanding can save us; as Vollmann has argued, “Younger people like to hope that maybe somehow they can change the world — and not just change it in the sense of moving it from one random state to another (which is what is always going to happen), but somehow to make the world better. But at a certain point you see more clearly that the world is obviously no better now than it ever was.” Still, if the world can’t be changed, it can be reckoned with, which is what Rising Up and Rising Down aspires to do.

RISING UP AND RISING DOWN| By WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN | McSweeney’s | 3,298 pages | $120, seven volumes, boxed, clothbound