- - - - Copyright 2003 Southland Publishing
- - - - LA City Beat
By Anthony Miller While our government's war against Iraq dominates public discussion even as Americans proclaim "zero tolerance" for acts of violence, William T. Vollmann asks us: When is violence justified? In Rising Up and Rising Down, his long-awaited mammoth treatise, the author plumbs the very depths of this question. Vollmann has always been obsessed with the profane lessons of history and capricious polemics of morality. He has traveled to far-flung regions to collect stories for his dozen books, many involving prostitutes, skinheads, and other characters from beyond the pale of society. Even before Rising Up and Rising Down, in his "Seven Dreams" series (four of which have been published so far), the novelist imagined various episodes in the history of violent collisions between European colonists and North America's native inhabitants. Vollmann has spent more time considering the issue of violence and its jusifications than any other contemporary author. Particularly at this moment in history, such a weighty inquiry demands our attention. To be sure, if you decide to tackle this almost 3,300-page book, you will need to be paying attention. Vollmann takes the reader on a sometimes harrowing, sometimes wearying, but always rewarding journey, as he engages in a virtuosic synthesis of empathy and intellect, murderers and martyrs, victims and tyrants, insurgents and revolutionaries, history and philosophy, perilous travelogue and ethical tabulation. Subtitled Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means, the book is divided into six volumes. These are profusely annotated and illustrated with sketches, maps, tables, charts, letters, and a number of powerful photographic portfolios. Some of the more abstract diagrams are reminiscent of the idiosyncratic schematics in W.B. Yeats's totalizing poetic treatise A Vision. Vollmann displays his penchant for erudite and evocative epigraphs throughout, referencing an encyclopedic array of texts and including many quotations from the Qur'-An. With his opening line — "Death is ordinary" — Vollmann offers an introductory contemplation of mortality that takes him from the Paris catacombs to a coroner's office in San Francisco to a morgue in Sarajevo. The first four volumes comprise "theoretical" chapters that consider such historical figures as Cicero, Caesar, Gandhi, Hitler, Napoleon, Lenin, Robespierre, T.E. Lawrence, Pancho Villa, John Brown, Joan of Arc, and the Marquis de Sade as "moral actors" to postulate what Vollmann calls a "moral calculus." He uses these characters to examine ideas about the defense of the self, honor, class, authority, race, culture, creed, war aims, homeland, ground, the earth, animals, gender, traitors, and revolution. One provocative section, "Trotsky and Lincoln," compares the two assassinated leaders to demonstrate the differences between what the author calls "preexisting" and "revolutionary" authority in waging a civil war. The last two volumes include "case histories" from Vollmann's own excursions as a self-described "part-time journalist of armed politics" into such countries as Colombia, Yugoslavia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the United States, and Afghanistan. These include his meeting in Burma with Khan Sa, the Opium King, which he regards as "one of my greatest experiences as a journalist," and his rescue of a child prostitute in Cambodia by purchasing — and, in effect, kidnapping — her. "Rising up" refers to justified violence when both ends and means are legitimate, while "rising down" signifies unjustified violence. The image of "rising" assumes many other guises here, from the political uprisings of discontented people to the bile rising in the throat of an angry individual — even to the all-consuming and ever-shifting force of violence itself. "Violence rises up and takes the sacrifices it finds," writes Vollmann. "It employs the means that it finds. It even takes whatever motives it finds. How could some benevolent hyperrationalist cabal ever eliminate murder by eliminating the reasons for murder, when in different countries we find such different reasons — and varied objects?" Vollmann's strongest work here centers on the violent struggles, not of communities or nations, but of individuals. The book's first part, "Definitions for Lonely Atoms," focuses on self-defense and self-reliance, where his examination of vigilante actions taken by subway shooter Bernhard Goetz later resonates with portraits of Curtis Sliwa and the Guardian Angels and of living "off the grid" with survivalist leader Bo Gritz. He begins his chapter on the justifiability of S/M with a pithy statement that acknowledges those familiar with his earlier books: "This chapter need not be long." His personal account of an acquaintance who commits suicide anchors his compelling reflections on the justifiability of violence against the self. Although one of his favorite authors, Yukio Mishima, appears sporadically, I wish Vollmann had devoted more time in his consideration of suicide to that writer and his final act of seppuku. Two years ago, after a reading of his novel Argall at Skylight Books, Vollmann stated, somewhat cryptically, of Mishima: "I admire his public suicide, and I pity his family." In the final part of the book, "Perception and Irrationality," Vollmann reflects: "I am interested in religion because violence is so irrational that we may well require something irrational to control it, and of all the irrational control mechanisms that come to mind religion would seem to have the greatest potential to do good." In a preface, Vollmann writes, "No doubt I have Osama bin Laden to thank for the fact that this work is getting published in my lifetime." The events of September 11, 2001, and the War on Terror loom large in the margins here, but he has resisted the impulse to "update" his findings. Vollmann describes his book as a "companion piece" to his 1987 debut novel about the revolution of insects against the avatars of electricity, You Bright and Risen Angels, and his 1992 memoir An Afghanistan Picture Show, in which he recounts battling alongside Mujahadeen freedom fighters in Afghanistan a decade earlier. Vollmann's views on violence have been further transmogrified by his later experiences. Rising Up and Rising Down is dedicated to Francis Tomasic and Will Brinton, two correspondents he watched die in Bosnia when the car in which they were all riding ran over a mine. Their deaths, the circumstances of which Vollmann revisits in the book, throw a shadow over the entire project. Since Rising Up and Rising Down was rejected by numerous major publishers, McSweeney's has taken one of its boldest steps in allowing this work to see the light. A considerably abridged 900-page edition will be published by Ecco next year, but readers of Vollmann's other lengthy tomes, as well as those who wish to explore all the complexities and interconnections of the author's argument, will want to read the whole thing. Those who plan on going the distance might do well to begin with the supplementary "resource volume" of the "moral calculus," which provides a skeleton key to the findings in the six volumes along with other useful addenda.If we had to consult his moral calculus to weigh all the factors and contingencies before acting on our impulses, there would be, at the very least, less time for violence. With its amalgamation of the theoretical and the experiential, Vollmann's book positions itself between Robert Burton and Richard Burton, the exhaustive analyst of human phenomena in The Anatomy of Melancholy and the intrepid and eloquent adventurer and storyteller. One of the most ambitious and uncompromising looks at psychological extremities and exigencies, Vollmann's summa on violence reveals his most devastating cri de coeur. - - - -
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