Michael Hemmingson - William T. Vollmann: A Critical Study and Seven Interviews

Table of Contents

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Hemmingson, Michael A.

William T. Vollmann : a critical study and seven interviews / Michael Hemmingson.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-978-0-786-45418-1

softcover : 50# alkaline paper

1. Vollmann, William T. Criticism and interpretation.

2. Vollmann, William T. Interviews. I. Title.

PS3572.O395Z75 2009

813.54 dc22 2009017960

British Library cataloguing data are available

2009 Michael Hemmingson. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Cover image: William T. Vollmann by Derek Fenner, courtesy of the artist; background 2009 Shutterstock

Manufactured in the United States of America

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640 www.mcfarlandpub.com

To Liv Kellgren,
for both helping and hindering
this project over the past four years

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the journals Fourth Genre, Modern Language Studies, and Review of Contemporary Fiction for publishing the reviews and review-essays of mine that were the basis for some of these chapters.

A truncated, somewhat different version of Chapter Four appeared as William T. Vollmanns Prostitute Trilogy in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction .

I would like to thank the interviewers for allowing me to reprint their conversations with Vollmann.

Finally, I would like to thank Dr. Matthew Bruccolli for his comments on early drafts of this study and Dr. Larry McCaffery for first suggesting that I immediately check out Vollmanns work back in 1991.

Preface

I wanted to write a critical study on Vollmann as far back as 1994, when I was living in a motel room in downtown San Diego and read The Rifles . For years I thought about it, tried to start it, then put it aside. I knew one day I would get back to the project. I also knew it would be some time before I could find the time and the desire. In the meantime, I wrote an academic essay for Critique ; a handful of review-essays for American Book Review and elsewhere; capsules for the Review of Contemporary Fiction . Then I co-edited Expelled from Eden: A William T. Vollmann Reader , a necessary contribution to the canon of contemporary American literature. My co-editor was Dr. Larry McCaffery he had suggested at a Fiction International party I read Vollmann (at the time I was a manuscript reader at the journal). He was telling everyone this; I may have been the only one there who took his advice. It is fitting that he worked with me on that reader, which, due to various delays in the publishing business and in life, took three years to select and compile, just as this book took me three years to get together. I am not usually that slow, but there were certain interferences. I made an independent film, The Watermelon . I wrote some novels and screenplays. I moved in and out of the academic world, switched from literary criticism to anthropological field work. However, I always came back to this overview.

During the time I worked on this study, Vollmann won the National Book Award for Europe Central and received the Strauss Living Award. He also published Poor People and Riding Toward Everywhere . Imperial is being released as this book is in its final stages. If you are reading this years after the 2009 publication date, there are most likely half a dozen Vollmann titles not addressed herein. I will leave that to future Vollmann scholars. This is the first book-length critical work on Vollmann; it is my intention that this study will be the starting point for all Vollmann studies.

This book is divided into two parts. Part I, Freedom, Redemption, and Prostitution consists of seven chapters that examine Vollmanns work by theme and series books on prostitution and the lives of sex workers and their clients; books on travel; short story collections; the Seven Dreams series; and the seven-volume Rising Up and Rising Down. Part II, Seven Conversations, collects interviews conducted over the years by both academics and fans, from print journals, e-zines, and forums, as well as two previously unpublished dialogues. The number seven is an intentional motif, reflecting Vollmanns use of it.

I have specifically chosen these interviews for their content, their chronology, and their relationship to my critical study. The reader can find certain aspects that I discuss drawn out in further detail in Vollmanns own words. The first interview, Moth to the Flame, is the first major interview with Vollmann, conducted by Larry McCaffery in 1991. At 15,000 words, it has never been published in its entirety until now, although parts of it have appeared over the years in Mondo 2000, Review of Contemporary Fiction, the book Some Other Frequency, and the Japanese magazine Positive . The bulk of the interview deals with Vollmanns early works his first novel, his first collection, the first volume of Seven Dreams . The second interview, The Write Stuff, is the first interview to be posted on the Web, in 1994, on the ground-breaking Alt-X.com. This interview delves more into the darker side of Vollmanns work prostitution, drugs, guns, and war. The third, Vollmann Shares Vision, also originally appeared online. The fourth, Pattern Recognitions, has never been published before and centers on Argall and the challenges of producing a large novel written in Elizabethan prose. Drinks with Tony is the fifth and is a transcript of an interview broadcast on Internet radio. It is more informal than the others just two guys talking about literature. Kate Bravermans The Subversive Dialogues is the sixth and first appeared in a much truncated form in The Bay Guardian ; it appears here in its full original version with a prose poem at the top. This interview reads like a performance piece, a short play, as the conversation is interrupted by a ringing telephone and the two characters popping pills. Finally, Teri Sauls interview, the seventh, is an essay about a trip to Vollmanns art studio in Sacramento and focuses on his paintings and book arts rather than his commercial books.

In each interview, the reader will find information that will help in understanding Vollmanns work as a whole. He is a complicated artist working on multiple levels of expression whether in fiction, essay, journalism, poetry, ethnography, photography, or oil paints, there are many ways to approach the work and life of William T. Vollmann.

Now he would never write the things he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well....

Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro

PART I

FREEDOM, REDEMPTION, AND PROSTITUTION

Introduction

In order to understand this we need also to consider the following....

Wittgenstein, I.18

William Tanner Vollmann appeared on the contemporary American literary scene in 1987 with the novel You Bright and Risen Angels . He has since published fourteen additional books and won the PEN/Hemingway, the Whiting, the National Book, and the Strauss Living awards. His work has never been easy to pigeonhole: it is a combination of fiction, memoir, erotica, journalism, social critique, ethnography, history, and speculative fiction. In stealth mode, Vollmann moves from one category to another, whether it is a study of sex workers or immigrants or Noh Theater artists, mixing genres with the skill and grace of a well-trained Yakuza assassin. In a 2006 interview with Poets & Writers Magazine , he contends the different genres are like different paint brushes you might pick up, which create different effects.... It doesnt really matter whether you are writing a detective story or a science fiction story.