William T. Vollmann
American novelist and manifestoist William T. Vollmann (also known in his fiction as William the Blind) will some day win the Nobel Prize, I'll wager; that is, if anyone ever reads him. But, I hear you exclaim, he's on all my friends' bookshelves; he must be widely read. Well, dear reader, have you burrowed through Rising Up and Rising Down's 3,500 pages? How about the abridged version's skimpy 733 pages, then? Even though he took the National Book Award for Europe Central in 2005, Vollmann's books are remaindered because they're hit and miss.
And then there are the indecorous subjects: prostitutes, drug use, skinheads, violence, seedy characters, war-zone tours, poverty and history in an ongoing seven-part revisioning of North America called Seven Dreams. And there's also the intimidating output of 17 supersized books, six in the past six years.
Vollmann is indeed an original. Only he could open a literary-prize acceptance speech with this cheery childhood memory: "When I was in elementary school, they showed me a film loop about burned corpses being pulled out of ovens." Vollmann's latest project, Imperial, is no less daunting than the rest and is for neither the craven nor the skint.
Imperial was originally conceived as a novel, but, out of respect to its countless real subjects, many of whom are downtrodden and whom Vollmann befriends ("I would never consider changing a word of their stories"), instead became a 1,300-page love letter to a patch of dirt. Imperial is ostensibly an agricultural history of the economic rise and fall of Imperial County, once California's most prized farmland and now the state's "poorest county."
If you're urban-tethered like me, then you won't much care that in 1922 "Imperial County becomes America's number-one lettuce producer." But Vollmann is well read (even if we don't read him well) and enjoys parsing the wheat from the chaff for you, plundering the fusty archives for the 1925 issue of the California Cultivator, say, among other finds, to season his narrative with fascinating irrelevancies like, "in 1853 somebody died by violence pretty much every day in Los Angeles."
Disquisitions abound on various themes, but water in relation to Imperial's agronomy is the primary subject: water pollution, transfers (from Imperial to L.A.), shortages, waterways, dams, even making water in An Essay on Urine - "Excuse me, but you're not against pissing, are you?" This meandering discussion ("this book forms itself as it goes") leads William the Blind on all kinds of exploratory kicks: Chinese tunnels in Mexico, California violence, the U.S.-Mexican Border Patrol, illegal crossings, foreign-owned Mexican factories ( maquiladoras), political segues on human freedom, migrant workers, musings on the quality of life in the United States and Mexico, to Mark Rothko's paintings, John Steinbeck's words and even poor Bill's love life - the breakup in the desert is utterly jejune. But then all of William the Blind's adventures are flawed, and therefore also beguiling.
I'd say that Bill Vollmann is perpetually fleeing from himself. I'd further speculate that one failure of duty when he was a little boy germinated a sense of duty to all humankind that he honours to this day. As a boy, he was charged with his younger sister's supervision: She died on his watch. "When I was growing up, my little sister drowned because I hadn't paid attention," he wrote in An Afghanistan Picture Show. Outside of this tiny declaration, the formative episode is treated in a hallucinatory account called Under the Grass, from The Atlas: "Until now I've scrubbed at the stain of your face on my brain's floor." Vollmann concludes: "Suppose I'd never done what they never said I did ... would I still have been brazed to ferocity year by year by the memory of your blue face?"
Basically, since then Vollmann has ferociously dared death, scouring the globe for danger and the downtrodden, redeeming underage Thai prostitutes, seeking conflicts in San Francisco's Tenderloin district, befriending skinheads and unofficially touring major war zones (he reportedly drove over a land mine in Bosnia, killing a good friend in the blast).
Imperial reads like the latter gasps of a tiring 50-year-old adventurer ("I was young then and sure of what I could do; I was writing my own story"), whose attempts to outrun his sister's memory and the guilt he bears for the gifts he inherited from her death have waned: "Your death was a great gift you gave me." How else are we to take Vollmann's sighing claim - after all he has seen and done in foreign lands - still to need to "get out into the world and see more, suffer more"? Suffer what, exactly? Why?
Vollmann is a tortured man on the hunt for anything not himself: "I, who don't belong here, was never anything but a word-haunted ghost," he enigmatically intones in Imperial. It is Vollmann's most unconsciously poignant book because, first, he's talking about an area of the world that he dearly loves, his home state. He doesn't seek exotic lands this time; he seeks in his own backyard. But while he talks about Imperial County, he's really talking about himself. Existential musings such as, "What about me?" and, "Well, who am I?" are interpolated everywhere, not to mention sincere expressions such as, "I want you to admire me," "I am actually not an entirely bad fellow," and "Like many other insane people I long to be considered 'balanced.'"
So this reader wonders if Vollmann really cares that much about Imperial's rise and fall, or any of the other hell-bent adventures in this book - and they are many. Vollmann, hearing that the New River that flows from the United States into Mexico is "the most polluted waterway in North America," rafts down this feculent river in a rubber dinghy and collects samples for testing: "I'd craved a fecal coliform count so badly that I could taste it."
Upon hearing that Mexican women who take work in foreign-owned factories are forced to "present bloody tampons for three consecutive months" to their managers to prove they aren't pregnant, Vollmann is so incensed at this degradation that he engages in corporate espionage to verify it, paying $1,600 for a shirt-button video camera and attendant battery pack that he places in his pants - and "scorches" his penis in the process.
Vollmann's adventures lead to a pretty impressive stimulus package in the making of this hefty book, too. Vollmann is a generous person - another manifestation of his living for others. Throughout, he is easy with his money, giving it to various street people, prostitutes, factory workers, migrant workers, even to "Juan the cokehead." Vollmann also hires guides, private eyes, genealogists, interviewees and research assistants.
Ultimately, his adventures prove nothing about the New River's pollution or worker's rights at the maquiladoras, and he concludes nothing. But this nothing is no mere nothing, for Vollmann's seeking via the adventures of William the Blind allows him to find himself in this magnificent and repugnant world: "Let me seek something grander than myself, something that I have not known; because what I do know is nothing, which is to say myself."
Tim Jacobs is a nominee for the 2009 Journey Prize for his short story INRI. He teaches English at the Ontario College of Art & Design and York University in Toronto.