Reconstructing the event from interviews the writer has given down the years, it would appear that the prodigious nine-year-old Vollmann, able to escape into a book as if into another world, was deep in reverie while his six-year-old sister drowned. In the course of Rising Up and Rising Down's "Meditations", we return, again in passing, to this primary trauma and the throwaway effect is just as powerful. Vollmann is shadowing the chief medical examiner of San Francisco, Dr Boyd Stephens, one of a number of front-line heroes who illuminate these volumes with their undaunted example.
Contemplating the tide of death and grief that fills the doctor's days, Vollmann recalls a woman who wrote to him twenty-six years after his sister's accident. "The woman wrote: 'I remember you, very thin, very pale, your shoulders hunched together, your hair all wet and streaming sideways.
You said, "I can't find Julie"'." In all the thousands of pages that follow, detailing atrocity, murder and mourning, those four words are among the most haunting. Indeed, there is a temptation to extrapolate from them a psychobiographical approach to Vollmann's oeuvre: the apparently obsessive need to place himself in dangerous situations, to rescue damsels in distress (in one case study, he attempts to get a student, Mica, out of besieged Sarejevo; in another, he rescues a child prostitute from a Thai brothel and relocates her to a safe house), and, above all, the urge to make us moral actors rather than passive observers. The temptation to provide a personal explanation should be resisted, however, for Vollmann himself treats this and similar incidents with restraint. Moreover, like most things in this work it is used purposefully: his grief is just one shard in a mosaic of grief, and the spirit in which he arranges pieces of autobiography within his overall design is caught by the gloss he gives some words of condolence he had from a friend: "She merely did this thing that can be done for any bereaved person, which was to show me her own sadness, so that my sadness would be less lonely".
In the course of what follows there is little danger of sadness being isolated.
Dr Stephens tells Vollmann "a Solomonic parable" about three mothers who show up at his morgue one night, each claiming a single corpse to be their long missing daughter. He reveals that desperate mothers would often claim a disfigured or decayed corpse as their child, so desperate were they for closure, although subsequent tests might show the body was not their loved one after all. On this grim night, Vollmann observes, "one mother was lucky. The dead girl was really her daughter".
As Vollmann watches the autopsies, marks the Y-shaped incisions (his extensive travels broadening his range of analogy: "the doctor was very good at what he did, like an old Eskimo whom I once saw cutting up a dying walrus. The scalpel made crisp sucking sounds"), Burton comes once more to mind, his anatomical metaphor - a study divided into partitions, sections and subsections -raised from the dead: "Can't we please proceed like Dr Stephen's employees, weighing, fingerprinting, cutting open all the sad and stinking dross of violence, trying to learn what causes what?". Vollmann is under no illusions about the scale of what he is up against. His Burtonian patchwork of quotations includes some longue duree despair from the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin: "What is more ancient and more universal than slavery? Cannibalism perhaps". Against this, there are shafts of transcendental optimism, like this from Thoreau: "I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized".
Vollmann's epic of first contacts, the Seven Dreams sequence, casts doubt on civilization's capacity to improve. Here, we get a mordant footnote: "I myself believe that we have stopped eating one another only under temporary compulsion".
At times, this text with its terrible accumulation of historical violence resembles some Ballardian atrocity exhibition: see the Japanese warrior class testing their new blades on the first commoners they encounter at a crossroads; observe the Comte de Charloais shooting workmen off his roof just for the pleasure of hitting his mark; consider the example of the Ik, the mountain tribe observed by the anthropologist Colin Turnbull, whose collective life has atrophied into a Hobbesian idea of the state of nature as state of war, in which husbands steal from wives, and mothers laugh as babies burn their hands in the hearth flames. Could this, Vollmann worries, rather than Rousseau's Tahiti, constitute mankind's natural state?
Faced with violence's variety and ubiquity, Vollmann proposes "a tentative ethics", even while apologizing for his non-academic status. This is somewhat disingenuous, for it is the maverick status of Vollmann that makes this work possible (few tenured academics would attempt it). His fiction has always aspired to the essay: it is discursive, often employing an elaborate apparatus of endnotes and cross reference, quotation and bibliography.
