A cover-story interview with William T. Vollmann, discussing his book The Atlas
Published June 21st, 1996, in The Minnesota Daily’s A&E Magazine
Who in the World is William T. Vollmann?
Violence, Carnage, Prostitution, Drugs… Vollmann Documents Decay and Creates Beauty in The Atlas
By William T. Vollmann
Viking, $25.95
Like the rest of these artists, Vollmann is
unclassifiable, a peculiar and perplexing mystery. Because of his outrageous
style, he’s often pigeonholed as “Pynchon-esque” or “Gaddis-esque” by critics,
but Vollmann defies categorization.
When I met him for our interview, he was wearing a
buttoned-up plaid shirt, high-top tennis shoes, a backpack strapped snugly on
both shoulders, and glasses secured with an elastic band. He almost looked like
a child dressed for school. Almost overly friendly, he spoke slowly and smiled
a lot as we drove to the Seward Cafe for lunch, chatting about himself, books,
the weather—whatever came to mind.
Despite his disarming appearance, Vollmann, like Proust or
Kafka, is hyper-observant—a meticulous scrutinizer of people and situations;
obviously something was going on beneath our pre-interview conversation. He ate
his gazpacho, gripping his spoon like a little kid, and seemed to scan the room
for material for his next book.
But it was his current book, The Atlas, that was
the subject at hand. The series of fifty-three interconnected stories in The
Atlas is, as Vollmann writes in his “Compiler’s Note” at the beginning of
the book, “arranged palindromically: the motif in the first story is taken up
again in the last; the second story finds its echo in the second to last, and
so on.” By Vollmann’s standards, the stories are short—anywhere from a
paragraph to twenty pages long. This shorter form, Vollmann says, was inspired
by Yasunari Kawabata’s Palm-of-the-Hand Stories.
“I just thought, ‘Well, I tried writing long things,’”
Vollmann said, “‘and I really like these Palm-of-the-Hand Stories. Let’s
see if I can do some.’ And I really enjoyed the form.” He added his own
distinctive spin, of course, writing a collection with a larger coherence,
stories that are, as Vollmann says, “interconnected just the way the world is
interconnected.”
Blending autobiography, fiction, self-styled myth, and
reportage, Vollmann describes these stories as “a piecemeal atlas of the world
I think in.” His range of topics is nearly encyclopedic, writing with equal
ease about Native Americans, the Bible, prostitutes, war, mosquitoes, crack,
and kickboxing. In one particularly harrowing story, “Blood,” the protagonist
has unprotected sex with an AIDS-infected prostitute to prove that he loves
her, and “The Hill of Gold” retells the story of the Roman conquest of Masada,
using Bible-like chapters and verses to create a new kind of mythology.
In the center of the palindrome is a much longer piece
called “The Atlas”: a surrealistic account of a man’s (Vollmann’s?) train ride
through Canada. The story portrays an entire lifetime over the course of a few
days. The man’s memory drifts all over the physical and emotional globe,
calling up wars, first loves, and dead friends, fashioning a panoramic and
intensely personal view of one man’s history. The Atlas is meant in part
to be a culmination of a lot of themes that Vollmann has dealt with in his
career, and the title story is an even more condensed version of Vollmann’s
fictional world.
Vollmann combines this compression of themes and concerns
with a density of prose that’s rarely found in modern fiction. For example, in
the story “The Atlas” he writes:
He brought his lips to the ice, which at first was
merely a glittering white surface of giant grains and crystals under the blue
sky, but as the purple cumuli drew across heaven like the underside of a metal
drawer the ice turned bluer and cooler-looking with a yellow line of evil
running across its surface, parallel to the horizon—he had a longing to devour
the horizons of the world; and he remembered the white line where the wintry
noon ended in Nevada, immense and fluffy, shooting cloud-stuff up into the sky
like some defense against falling stars, so vast and triumphant and far away across
the plains of tan, rust and beige. His lips did not stick to the ice yet.
As the story builds, its seemingly unrelated narrative
threads cross and recross until the reader unwittingly attains a grand,
transcendent vision of this character’s life.
“Yeah, I’ve smoked crack. I’ve had sex with prostitutes,”
he says. “Have you ever read Stephen Crane? When you read Maggie: A Girl of
the Streets you get the impression that he [Crane] might have hung out with
these people [prostitutes], but the actual descriptions of her being a
prostitute are not very full or very convincing. Either he did it and didn’t
feel comfortable writing about it, or else he didn’t do enough of it.”
That night at The Hungry Mind bookstore, Vollmann was
equally frank before the packed crowd of cultish fans and curious spectators.
“When I travel it’s important for me to make connections in the city,” he said,
“to find someone who will take care of me—like a big sister—and who better than
a prostitute?”
One angry attendee, who admitted to having never read
Vollmann’s work, berated him: “You’re just adding to the literature of
prostitution, which just perpetuates exploitation.”
“I’ve done more for prostitutes than you have!” Vollmann
answered, resolute. “When I was in Thailand, I kidnapped a twelve-year-old
slave prostitute and placed her in a convent. Now she’s learning to sew and can
lead a normal life.”
Vollmann’s detractors fail to see that his literary
treatment of prostitution is not celebratory, nor is it exploitive or
degrading. It’s simply honest. Vollmann feels that these marginalized women
deserve representation.
“And,” Vollmann added, “you should write about what you
know, just like Hemingway said.”
Like Hemingway, Vollmann works as a war correspondent, a
job that recently took him to Sarajevo. There he wrote an article for the Los
Angeles Times and did a series of broadcasts for the BBC called “The
Yugoslav Notes.”
“All that material,” he said, “will end up in this long
violence book that I’m writing.” Vollmann has been working on the book—a
nonfictional study of violence that is already 1,500 pages long—for several years.
“That’s why I’ve been going to so many war zones.”
“All three of the Sarajevo stories [in The Atlas]
are literally true,” Vollmann says. One story, “That’s Nice,” describes the
main character’s almost surreal struggle with the owner of a rental car that
had been destroyed by shelling. As it turns out, Vollmann and two of his
friends were in the car when it was hit. Everyone except Vollmann died. “One of
them was my high school friend, my translator,” Vollmann says. “The other was
another journalist that we met who was traveling with us.”
Vollmann has often been to southeast Asia, especially
Thailand and Cambodia, where, he says, “it’s so easy to meet all kinds of
insurgents, politicians, to say nothing of prostitutes who like you.” He had
planned on meeting Pol Pot, the former dictator of Cambodia whose Khmer Rouge
killed more than one million people. He was believed to be hiding out in China,
and an interview with him would have been the crowning achievement for the
violence book, but Pol Pot died just a few weeks ago (soon after our interview
took place).
Ugliness attracts Vollmann; he immerses himself in it; he
befriends it. Often his work is a dialogue with violence. While writing one
piece for The Rainbow Stories, “The White Knights,” Vollmann hung out
with the S.F. Skinz, a group of San Francisco neo-Nazis. Near the end of the
story, he let them read the in-progress work to check its accuracy.
“I think that’s just a decent, human thing that anyone
could do,” he says, “because if you’re letting somebody into your world, the
person’s studying you like a bug or something, then maybe that person’s gonna
get something wrong.” The skinheads liked the story, although they told him
that it had “too many run-on sentences,” a line that he included in the story.
This openness and lack of prejudice allows for a closeness
to the subject that’s almost terrifying, and maybe not for everyone.
“They weren’t bad people, for the
most part,” Vollmann says. “Some of them did bad things. If you just say they
do bad things, that doesn’t really let you understand them. Every person
deserves to be respected and be listened to and understood. I don’t care
whether he’s Jesus Christ or Hitler. And chances are, if we could meet both of
those guys right here and sit them side by side and talk to them, we might
think that maybe Jesus wasn’t as impressive as he was cracked up to be, and
maybe Hitler wasn’t one hundred percent evil either, because it’s hard to
imagine somebody being one hundred percent one way or another.”
After our interview, I went with
Vollmann to the Uptown store Dreamhaven, where he bought two books on bondage.
Later I took him for a drive through south Minneapolis, showing him the action
on East Lake Street.
“This is where I live,” I said as
I drove him through my neighborhood, pointing out crack houses, prostitutes,
and gangsters.
“Yeah,” he replied, “it’s pretty
nice.”
—David Wiley
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