His research and travels become part of the plot of the Seven Dreams novels in particular: in the most recent instalment, Argall (2001), for example, his journey to a run-down Gravesend and Pocahontas's last resting place is one of many personal epiphanies that break through the surface of his richly imagined Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. His account of how the material for the story was gathered overlays and interpenetrates the narrative to produce an idiosyncratic kind of Verfremdungseffekt that is, paradoxically, involving.
There is an awareness of the mental and physical labour behind the work which does not destroy the mystique of the art, but draws the reader into its making with great intensity.
Rising Up and Rising Down is a novelist's version of scholarship, full of highly wrought acts of empathy and detailed description.
Vollmann makes no apology for this; in a note on the literary language of his study he explains why a work which is organized on a theoretical basis indulges in so much "ornate description". He defends this both on the grounds of verisimilitude (we need to know the colours of the Burmese jungle at twilight, or the scorched smell of a shelled city, "precisely because local conditions have such an effect on a person's outlook") and of aesthetics ("because I figured that if my theorizing were wrong or unpalat-able, the reader might at least have some moments of pleasure"). If "pleasure" seems frivolous in this context, it should be remembered that Vollmann is referring to the pleasure that always comes from precision and felicity, whatever the subject matter, and also to the fugitive pleasure we must take in a violent world. At one point in the case studies he describes himself lying outside Mostar in a mine-wrecked car, his two friends dead or dying in the front seats, expecting snipers to finish him off at any moment, focusing intently on the fluttering and preening of a small white bird on the guard rail of the dam they had failed to cross.
There is no shortage of theorizing, however, or, at least of organization. In the three Justifications volumes, Vollmann codifies the various "Defenses" that can be made to justify violence: "Defense of Honor", "Defense of Class", "Defense of Ground", and so on. He proceeds through induction, common sense and consideration of the actions of a number of modern, historical and mythic individuals who have behaved violently or refrained from violence -including Trotsky, Napoleon, Cortes, Christ, Lincoln, Stalin, Gandhi and "Virginia" of the Animal Liberation Front (a mixture of myth, history and the anecdotal, so alien to today's scholarship, gives Vollmann's text much of its eccentric energy) -to arrive at a way of categorizing violence.
Each "Defense" works through lengthy examples of the moral dilemmas and convolutions faced by his cast of "moral actors", arriving finally at ethical, if unorthodox, conclusions. These conclusions are collated and extracted for the Moral Calculus volume which consists of a series of axioms or Wittgensteinian thought-experiments. Because history is messy and spills between categories, certain "moral actors" and situations turn up in more than one Volume. Cortes's capture of Montezuma and struggle for Mexico City, to take one thickly described example, turns up in both "Defense of Creed" and "Defense of Ground", in Justifications Volumes Two and Three.
In terms of Defense of Ground, justification can be made for the invading conquistadors. Vollmann's conclusion, enshrined in the Moral Calculus volume is that "defense of ground is justified by imminent self-defense, even during unjust aggression". When Cortes and his men are cornered by Montezuma's forces, they are justified in defending the ground they stand on; where Cortes is at fault is in assuming "that he can move his ground where he lists". Time and again in these volumes, self-sovereignty takes ethical precedence over dominion. "Imminent self-defense" is regularly invoked in different contexts; it is the sturdiest justification for violence, just as "The Golden Rule" (which undergoes significant variations throughout the work) is the most concentrated of the moral calculi: "Do as you would be done by".
In the "Defense of Creed" section, Cortes is shown in a different light, accused of abiding by a perverted moral calculus:
