For the rest of the day, you can get any available issue of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern for $5. Yep. Just $5. This deal is only good through Friday (today), so stock up before the long holiday weekend. - - - - |
- - - - Copyright Knowledge DeZigns, Inc. 200
- - - - A Talk with William T. Vollmann: the mad genius of American letters by Kevin Canfield William T. Vollmann
Between frequent research and reporting journeys that have taken him across the globe, William T. Vollmann has found time to write and publish more than a dozen books in the last 15 years. His last effort, the 700-plus page Argall, was the fourth in a planned seven-book series of historical novels. He is also currently at work on a collection of short stories set in Europe during World War II. But none of the author's work matches the scope of the upcoming Rising Up and Rising Down. A massive history and exploration of violence nearly 20 years in the making, this multi-volume project could be the defining work of Vollmann's career. McSweeney's Books plans to publish it late this year or sometime in 2003. Recently, Vollmann took time to talk about Rising Up and Rising Down from his home in Sacramento. KC: Talk first about, if you would, where the idea for the project came from. Vollmann: Well, gosh, this was a long time ago back in the very early 1980s. I've always been very interested in communism, and I've read a lot of stuff, especially about the Bolshevik Revolution. At that time a lot of the material on the atrocities that Lenin had committed was still unavailable; it was still in the archives. It wasn't really until Glasnost and then the fall of the Soviet Union that a lot of this stuff became available. It was possible to at least consider the idea that maybe the revolution had gone wrong in Stalin's time and not Lenin's time. And it's still possible to consider the idea that Lenin meant well. In that case [I sought to learn], where did the revolution go wrong? And more generally, when is revolution justified? It's the kind of thing that a young person is interested in. It's young people who make revolutions, and I was one of them at that time. So from there it sort of spread to, more generally, when is violence justified? And can we make any sort of conclusions about what's a just war, when is the death penalty justified? What about vegetarianism? Should people be eating animals? All this kind of stuff. And so I suddenly realized that this was an immense project and I just chipped away at it for years and years until I got something. KC: How big is it - how many pages or volumes? What can sort of quantify that? Vollmann: It's about 4,000 manuscript pages, including the illustrations. KC: And when it makes it to readers, it will be how long do you suppose, and how many volumes? Vollmann: Well, it depends on how it's printed. I would say three to six volumes. It could be three fat ones or six skinny ones. KC: Is there an official publication date? Do you know when people will see it? Vollmann: McSweeney's, the publisher who's going to do it, originally hoped that it would be coming out this fall, which I think is ridiculous. I would say if we're lucky it'll come out sometime next year. Actually, it probably will. [McSweeney's is] being really nice. They're great to work with. I told them I wanted a fact checker since some of the things that I say may be controversial and I'm not a scholar. Or not an academic, and I'm talking about so many different things. At the very least I want to make sure that I'm not making errors in my sources. And so they've given me four or five of them. They're great people to work with. They've been looking up every single book that I cite. I don't know how many I cite, but the bibliography is probably like 100 pages long. KC: Give me a sense of what is actually in the books and what might be controversial about them? Vollmann: The book is divided into three parts. The first part is the longest and it's a theoretical part. Basically the way that I've chosen to address the question is to subdivide violence into a large but finite number of categories and address each category. And so we have things like, when is defense of honor justified? When is defense of race justified? Defense of homeland? Defense against traitors? Defense of the revolution? Defense of war aims? Defense of class? Defense of creed? And so on and so forth. Each one of those is a chapter in its own right. And the chapters try to tell examples from pretty much all periods of history, and I try to make the thing interesting to read so that it's literature in its own right. At the same time, [I want to] get the story across, get the point across. So, defense of honor happens to talk about Joan of Arc and Napoleon and the California Youth Authority - just all kinds of different things like this. And from each one of these chapters I try to determine what these people did that was right and what they did that wasn't right, codify that into a series of rules. After this theoretical section is over, there's another section, which is my moral calculus. That is not very long; it's about 50 manuscript pages. And it simply is all these rules that I've come up with or extracted from the historical examples and arranged almost like the key to some Audubon guide. So you know the kind of violence in question and you can look it up. For instance, when is violent defense of ground justified? And defense of ground, an example might be, Cortez invades Mexico City. And the Mexicans surround the Spaniards at one point and the Spaniards have to defend their ground; if they don't they're going to be destroyed. So are they justified in doing that? My answer would be they're justified by "imminent self-defense" even if their aggression is unjust. So that would be one of the rules for instance. And then the final section is probably the most interesting for people to read. It's a series of case studies from the places that I've been all over the world, and they relate fairly directly to these various kinds of violence. Often different kinds of violence are present in the same situation since it's real life and real life is complicated. There's a long chapter about what I saw in Bosnia, there's a chapter about the Yakuza, the Japanese mafia, and so forth. The whole book is profusely illustrated, and so that's how it is. So in parts hopefully it's a good read and in other parts it's about as exciting as the phone book. KC: Let me back up a little bit. You talked about McSweeney's. Talk about how difficult it was to find a publisher to do this the way you wanted to do it. Vollmann: Very difficult. The publishers that I have for my other books offered to do this book if I would agree to abridge it but I didn't want to do that. So it just sat there. And eventually at one of my readings, actually for my last book, [McSweeney's] Dave Eggers approached me in the audience and asked me if the book was still untaken and I said it was. And he was nice enough to offer to do it, so I'm very happy about it. KC: Who is the audience for this book? And, sort of a two-parter here, do people have the attention span for this sort of work? Vollmann: My ideal audience would be politicians, terrorists, soldiers; people like that. People who actually have the will and the means to commit acts of violence and some of whom might have the intelligence to consider whether they should or whether they shouldn't. I've tried to make the moral calculus open-ended enough so that even people who might strongly disagree about things like, say, whether the death penalty is fair could still make sure that at least they would be conservative in the violence they inflicted and true to their own presuppositions. Somebody once said in a book on just and unjust wars that the actual definition of who a noncombatant is, is less important than the fact that some people are considered noncombatants. That's sort of a useful way to look at the whole thing. Somebody like Hitler would say that violence is justified under any circumstances, really, to attain one's end. Somebody like Gandhi would say that it's never justified. And I think that both of them are wrong. KC: How much do you deal with 9/11 in the book? Vollmann: Not at all. The book was finished long before 9/11...I don't see any reason to be an opportunist and rush out and add a bunch of stuff about 9/11 that doesn't really affect what I have to say at all. But maybe Osama will sell a few of these books for me. Who's to say? - - - -
|
Red dot denotes content that is new today.
Black dot denotes newish content.