Epic Pessimism
Author William
Vollmann Records the Infinite Varieties of Human Suffering
in His Encyclopedic New Novel, Fathers and Crows
By Eric Roth
Dressed casually in a plaid shirt,
an orange baseball cap, and old sneakers, author William
Vollmann appears out of place behind the podium at Venice's
hip literary center , Beyond Baroque. Yet Vollmann commands
the audience's attention as he shares with them the painful
images and horrific descriptions from his latest opus: Fathers
and Crows. At one point during his reading, Vollmann picks
up a starter's pistol and fires it. Noise echoes in the
quiet leading room. "I don't want anyone falling asleep,
" explains the 32-year-old California native and author
of seven published books.
Fathers and Crows is Vollmann's 990-page exploration of
the hidden motives of the 17th-century Jesuit priests who
brought Christianity and disease to the Huron Indians. Soon
after, the Iroquois wiped out the Huron, their traditional
enemies, but they also eventually encountered the Jesuits
who spiritually and militarily conquered
the Iroquois.
Black Robe, an acclaimed film released last year, focused
on the same tragic events. "It's a pretty good movie,
" Vollmann says in an interview with me, "but
it covers maybe two percent of the time my book does. "
As his pistol gimmick makes clear, Vollmann demands attention,
and be ERIC has been getting quite a lot of it lately, He
entered literary history this year when three different
publishers released his works: The Afghanistan Picture Show,
or How I Saved the World: Fathers and Crows: and Whores
for Gloria. Critics have taken notice. Publisher's Weekly
hailed Vollmann as an "Ovid in our midst" whose,
"ambition |is| without parallel. "
David Sacks, a New York Times critic, advises readers to
"imagine a performance of Wagner's King cycle directed
by Sam Peckinpah with a new libretto by J. R. R. Tolkien
and occasional music by Aaron Copland" to get a feeling
for Vollmann's unique style. A recent Esquire profile was
more direct, calling Vollmann "a sick, talented bastard."
Other critics were even more severe, dismissing Vollmann's
experimental writings as "reader unfriendly."
"The books are so difficult, dense, and depressing
that people really don't like to read them," Vollmann
says. "Too many critics and readers are intellectually
and morally lazy."
While many novelists specialize in a narrow field, Vollmann
dares to write about everything from the Vikings' "discovery"
of North America and Afghanistan's cruel civil war to San
Francisco's seedy Tenderloin district and modern philosopher
Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Vollmann's challenging and idiosyncratic works combine exotic
situations, personal experiences, exhaustive research, unorthodox
punctuation, and ironic, meticulous details documenting
humankind's capacity for religious delusion, perverted love,
and extreme violence. The resulting detached and authoritative
tone gives his complex, pessimistic works the strange feel
of a post-modern encyclopedia. Vollmann’s favorite
topic remains the almost infinite varieties of human suffering.
"Everybody suffers, " Vollmann says. “It
kind of hurts when you get born. Most of the time it hurts
when you die, and often it hurts in between. All my works
are about people in pain living to cope and survive."
Does Vollmann see any distinction between Afghanistan's
war victims, the Cambodians murdered in the killing fields
and San Francisco's prostitutes? "Pain is pain,"
he replies. "A lot of the Afghans, the Khmer Rouge,
the prostitutes, are unhappy or miserable people. It doesn't
make a lot of sense to say this person suffers more than
someone else."
Yet beneath this universal tolerance, Vollmann appears to
delight in shocking people with alleged hard truths. In
one book jacket photo, for instance, a gun is pointed at
Vollmann's head. He brags about visiting prostitutes regularly
and then writes books celebrating his "professional
research." The hero (autobiographical) of his first
novel, You Bright and Risen Angels renounces humanity
to join the insect world.
Vollmann remains obsessed with graphic violence, human suffering
and the pervasive use of abstract language to disguise and
even justify "I judge situations, not individuals,"
continues Vollmann, who as a journalist working in Cambodia,
interviewed dozens of former Khmer Rouge members. "There
is nobody you can blame." What about Pol Pot, the leader
of the Khmer Rouge? "You shouldn't blame anybody for
any anything," replies Vollmann. "That doesn't
mean you shouldn't act. I'd probably execute Pol Pot."
Vollmann maintains sympathy for everyone trapped in political
and historical conflicts. In Fathers and Crows, he adamantly
refuses to take sides between the Jesuits and the Native
Americans in their spiritual and cultural war. Instead,
the author takes pains to reconstruct how participants might
have viewed their own lives. His book includes 51 pages
of source notes. Yet Vollmaun's horrific descriptions of
routine, torture by both indigenous tribes and European
conquerors are far from the current politically correct
standards.
"You can't blame the Jesuits for bring the unknowing
carriers of disease, " says Vollmann. "You certainly
can't blame them for the lroquois destroying the Huron.
And given their presumptions that life on earth has no worth
and the afterlife is all important, you can't blame them
for baptizing dying people and saving souls."
Vollmann thinks many people are asking the wrong questions
about (be difficult relationships and bloody conflicts between
Indians and Europeans. "There was no way it could have
been any different, " he argues. "First, the Indians
were genetically isolated and highly vulnerable to disease.
Secondly, the material culture of the Indian tribes was
vastly inferior to Europeans. "The Jesuits' religious
zeal to convert Indians, according to Vollmann, might have
helped save some of them.
"The French (who sponsored the Jesuits) were very,
very mild conquerors compared to other imperialists. The
English didn't bother with saving souls. They just burned
down whatever Indian towns existed and seized the land.
" Vollmann plans to write another lengthy book on the
nth Century Puritan wars against Indians in New England
illuminating this point.
"People terribly over romanticize the Indian tribes,
" Vollmann contends. "We previously marginalized
them. But they were no better and no worse than any other
civilization. They just were and are."
"History devours what happens, without any reason.
History devoured the Crow," concludes Vollmann in Fathers
and Crows, the second volume in his planned Seven Dreams
series. In this ambitious fifteen-year project, Vollmann
wanders across the last 400 years, bouncing around time
and space and offering a cacophony of anguished voices.
In navigating his "stream of time" tale, Vollmann
uses a caustic and ironic narrator called William the Blind
who recounts the vicious battle for souls, the ritual torture
of prisoners, and multiple Huron plagues starting in 1634.
Despite its peculiar sentence structure, encyclopedic size,
abrupt changes in viewpoints, and confusing plotline. Fathers
and Crows captures the reader's interest. Its seductive
and mysterious topic—the Jesuit priests' passionate
search for "infinite glory" by dying, preferably
painfully, as a Catholic martyr for God—is a far cry.
for better or worse, from our narcissistic consumer culture.
Unfortunately, the constant bombardment of meticulous details
and horrific descriptions eventually overwhelms and desensitizes
the reader. A vigorous editor might have improved the book's
dramatic impact by reducing its size by half. Still, Vollmann's
style of writing short segments, almost like newspaper articles,
allows one to skip and skim fruitfully for numerous hours.
Perhaps Vollmann's fascination with extreme culture shock
can be traced to his experience as a volunteer with the
Afghan Islamic guerillas fighting against the Soviet Red
Army's occupation of Afghanistan. "I wanted to go to
war, to help the world, to do good, " recalls Vollmann.
"But good intentions alone are worthless. I was totally
useless. I couldn't speak the language, I could barely fire
a gun, and I spent more money than I raised for them [the
Afghan resistance fighters]. Besides, they could never under–stand
why I was there. Just wanting to be good was utterly baffling
to them. " The strict Islamic laws regulating women's
behavior, the reselling of donated medical supplies, and
the constant power struggles within the Afghan resistance
further disillusioned Vollmann. The experience also solidified
his conviction that being indigenous had little or nothing
to do with a culture's being "good" or "bad.
"
Confused by the Afghan traditions and pervasive corruption,
horrified at Soviet brutality, and disgusted at the Americanpublic's
indifference, Vollmann retreated into a philosophical fatalism
about the Afghanistan war, politics, and humanity in general.
"Whatever happens has to be okay because it is happening,
" he says. This abstract, hyper-analytic logic is pure
Vollmann. He prefers "big picture" perspectives,
terrible truths delivered in technical jargon, and abstract
ideals like History, Time, and Destiny. "One of the
best hopes that we have right now is the AIDS epidemic.
Maybe the best thing that could happen would be if it were
to wipe out half or two-thirds of the people in the world.
The survivors would have to help each other and. in time,
maybe the world would recover ecologically too. "
When challenged on his jarring and stark comments (an even
stronger version was first quoted in Publisher's Weekly),
Vollmann vigorously defends his stand. "I'm not gleeful
about AIDS," emphasizes Vollmann. "I may get it.
I wish mankind could reform itself without AIDS, but that's
not happening. The human race is in serious trouble. We
are destroying the planet. If it's not AIDS, then it will
be something else. I have idealistic hopes, not idealistic
expectations.”
The terror of Vollmann's insights probably accounts for
the peculiar appeal of his brilliant, disturbing, and extremely
violent books. His sharp, jagged prose tries to tell the
tangled truth about the deep pathological roots underlying
our troubled times. "You always piss people off if
you tell the truth, " concludes Vollmann. Or perhaps
Vollmann's powerful, haunting, and dangerously "rational"
writings, with their seductive logic and abstract language
are merely servants of the human instinct for cruelty.
