RISING UP AND RISING DOWN. By William T. Vollmann. Volume One: Categories and Justifications. 332pp. Volume Two: Justifications. 557pp. Volume Three:
Justifications. 495pp. Volume Four: Justifications. 340pp. Volume Five: Studies in Consequences. 623pp. Volume Six: Studies in Consequences. 670pp. Volume MC:
The Moral Calculus. 282pp. www.mcsweeneys.net. $120 the set. - 1 932416 02 1
William Vollmann's ethics, poetics and autopsies
Still only in his mid-forties, William T. Vollmann has already produced a vast corpus of novels, short stories, journalism and, most impressively, four instalments of an ongoing sequence of Seven Dreams, his "symbolic history" of the traumatic encounter between European incomers and indigenous Americans; this sequence itself, when complete, could prove one of the abiding achievements of contemporary American fiction. But all this, it turns out, is only the tip of the iceberg, for during the twenty or so years of his writing career, and most of his adult life, Vollmann has also been working on the extraordinary project now before us, Rising Up and Rising Down, a 3,352-page, seven-volume "essay" on violence, its varieties and justifications. It seems to have served as a sourcebook and rationale for much of what he has already published, but the fiction -and certainly the journalism (much of which reappears here) -could equally be said to lead to this summa: Vollmann's most overt, but typically unconventional, intervention in the unfashionable domain of ethics; his attempt to "do good", to be of practical help to us "moral actors" in a bloody, morally ambiguous world.
Faced with "uncategorizable" works, the critic's natural tendency is to reach for precedent, especially when the uncategorizable work in question is organized around an impulse to categorize. Vollmann's writing has always challenged generic distinctions: between history and fiction; between eyewitness and dream-vision; between poeticism and naturalism.
For all the postmodern metafictional devices he employs, he displays something akin to a premodern or early-modern conception of writing as a process which transcends disciplines. To that extent, this is his "Anatomy of Violence", three times as long as Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, similarly stuffed with quotations, the rich pickings of a fellow "library cormorant". But whereas the study-bound Burton by his own account "never travelled but in map or card" and was "a mere spectator of other men's fortunes and adventures", Vollmann, in his role as journalist and "student of armed politics", has regularly velcroed on his trauma plate (his body armour helped save his life in the early 1990s when two friends died in a car that hit a mine outside Mostar) and ventured into the world's war zones and ghettos, its killing fields and besieged cities, to bear witness in his own inimitable manner. The first four volumes of this study, the theoretical sections, or Justifications, distil Vollmann's wide reading and sustained meditation on the subject; the fifth and sixth, the Studies in Consequences, are case studies, two large collections of personal experience and observation. The seventh volume, MC: The Moral Calculus, or "resource volume", is offered to us as a kind of thread through the ethical labyrinth.
Before the Justifications get properly under way, we are given "Three Meditations on Death". First, there is a descent into the underworld; in the Paris catacombs, we are guided past walls clustered with memento mori. (The tourists in Vollmann's party are irreverent and irrepressible rather than mortified by human vanity and transience, however; the guards at the exit matter-of-fact as they examine backpacks for filched souvenir skulls.) This reflective introduction displays the Gothic strain that has always been present in Vollmann's work, the morbidly lyrical flourishes on life, death and mutability that owe a debt to Edgar Allan Poe -to whom he pays homage in "The Grave of Lost Stories" in his collection Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs
(1991) -juxtaposed with laconic asides and drip-fed personal revelations that are sometimes shattering.
The first book Vollmann wrote (though its publication was delayed for ten years) was a memoir, An Afghanistan Picture Show (1992), an account of an intellectually precocious but politically naive "Young Man", heady with Lawrence of Arabia delusions, travelling to Afghanistan to join the struggle against the invading Soviet Army. In the course of that book, Vollmann, in passing, accounts for his close attention to detail thus: "When I was growing up, my little sister drowned because I hadn't paid attention".
