Notes From Underground: American Literature,
Alive and Well and in the Hands of Maniacs
Originally published in the Underdog, a journal published by the University of Amsterdam’s English Department, April/May 1998
But
fortunately, there’s a strong undercurrent working against this seemingly
monolithic flow of domestic blah—a fistful of young (as well as older) writers
not only showing us the America we feared existed, but doing it in ways that
challenge the very place—and purpose—of literature. Not satisfied with
producing “slices of life” in the conventional sense, our best writers’ work is
a complex dialogue with reality—or “reality,” since the way these writers
portray the world often dismisses the notion of any kind of objective or
capturable truth. Rejecting the sanitized TV world, these writers’ work is like
the notion of TV itself—bizarre, choppy, problematic, unsettling, endlessly
self-referential and, above all, postmodern.
Leading
the pack—or maybe being the entire pack himself—is the thirty-eight-year-old
novelist William T. Vollmann. Extending the fictional legacy left him by the
previous generation’s literary weirdoes—Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Toni
Morrison, Don DeLillo and Cynthia Ozick, to name a few—Vollmann stands as one
of our most exciting—and disturbing—fictioneers. Having published approximately
5,000 pages worth of material in the last eleven years, Vollmann is charting a
literary world that’s as breathtaking in its vision as it is exhausting in
scope. Mixing together the fantastic and the ostensibly real, his world is a
creepy, ever-shifting confusion of reportage and myth, and his overall effect
on the reader—like that of Pynchon or Gaddis or even Melville—is a strange
feeling of having journeyed through a parallel universe that only calls
itself America.
In
1982, having just graduated from Cornell University, Vollmann crossed into
Afghanistan with Islamic commandos, gathering material for what would become The Afghanistan Picture Show, and after
that he worked as a computer programmer in San Francisco. I interviewed
Vollmann two years ago for The Minnesota
Daily, and he says that he wrote his first novel, You Bright and Risen Angels, while living in his office. He worked
for eight hours, slept for eight hours, and wrote for eight hours, and the
resulting novel is one of the most astonishingly weird books of our time.
Although not as successful in artistic terms as his later work, You Bright and Risen Angels invented a
new world of possibility for the novel. Narrated both by someone called “The
Author,” a man working in a computer programming office, and by “Big George,” a
ubiquitous electrical force that oversees everything, the novel tells the story
of a bloody revolutionary war between insects and electricity. With two
narrators, the reader never knows who’s speaking or who’s in charge of the
text, and with the story jumping between stylized versions of American history
and absurd flights of imagination, the novel challenges almost every assumption
about what a novel is supposed to do.
Vollmann’s
second book, The Rainbow Stories, is
probably my favorite of his works, addressing such diverse subjects as neo-Nazi
skinheads, prostitution, Islamic assassins, and the Bible. Each story takes up
a different color, and the result is a widely variegated vision of Vollmann’s
literary spectrum. Vollmann’s most recent book, The Atlas, attempts a similar scope, the stories spanning both the
literal globe and the author’s literary globe, and with a palindromic structure
holding the stories together, the collection falls back on itself like a book
closing itself at its end. Vollmann is also at work on a series called Seven Dreams, which tells the history of
America beginning with the first interactions between Native Americans and
Norse conquerors and probably taking us up to the present day. He’s published
the first, second, and sixth volumes of the series, and he’s sporadically
working on the others as we speak. Also highly recommended is his short novel Whores for Gloria, which, like Pynchon’s
The Crying of Lot 49, presents a
brief, bizarre, and endlessly suggestive nightmare vision of the American
underworld.
Like
Vollmann, our other leading literary lights are the ones who challenge us both
textually and contextually, taking up not just new fictional territory, but
also new ways of exploring that territory. The biggest standouts seem to be
David Foster Wallace, Rikki Ducornet, and Richard Grossman, who are all writing
novels as if they were not just reinventing the wheel, but were inventing
something completely unimagined. Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest is probably the best example of what I’m talking
about; taking on politics, popular culture, family life, and the novel itself,
it explores the world of art and entertainment in ways that question their very
nature. And at almost 1,100 pages, you’d think he’d be able to come up with
some kind of exhaustive lexicon of the states of art and entertainment; but in
his most postmodern move, the novel ends about 600 or 700 pages short of
resolution. Although it may be somewhat influenced by Vollmann’s first novel,
which constantly refers to forthcoming (and nonexistent) volumes and whose
table of contents covers about three times more ground than the novel itself, Infinite Jest’s ending suggests new ways
for novels to think about themselves. It’s massive and incomplete, and this may
be the best we can hope for these days.
Rikki
Ducornet, although not as young as Vollmann or Wallace, is still on the cutting
edge of what’s going on in American letters. But while those two bring to mind
Pynchon or Gaddis, she recalls writers such as Lewis Carroll, the Marquis de
Sade, Kafka, and Borges. Unlikely bedfellows, for sure, but in Ducornet’s zany
literary universe, absurd juxtapositions are the name of the game. She throws
anything she can think of into her books, and what results is a kind of
salmagundi that sometimes seems disconnected but invariably adds up to
something amazing. Her best book is Phosphor
in Dreamland, which is an epistolary novel telling the story of the
semi-mythic island Birdland, focusing on its most famous inhabitant, a
seventeenth-century poet, philosopher, and artist named Phosphor. When I
interviewed her last year, Ducornet cited the late British novelist Angela
Carter as a big influence (and friend), and like Carter (and Phosphor),
Ducornet is a rare bird who defies all categorization.
The newest writer on my list is Richard
Grossman, who’s at work on a series called the American Letters Trilogy, which depicts America as Hell, Purgatory,
and Paradise, respectively. The first volume, The Alphabet Man, which tells the story of a poet/murderer named
Clyde Wayne Franklin, is a crazy mishmash of straight narrative, poetry,
disjointed hallucinations, and linguistic experiments. It’s a little like
William Faulkner on LSD. The second volume, The
Book of Lazarus, is even stranger (and better), weaving letters, photos,
epitaphs, aphorisms, and reminiscences into a tale of political and social
creepiness and ambiguity. Grossman is working on the third volume at present,
so we’ll have to wait a while to get to Paradise.
Of
course there’s a lot more great work going on in American literature than the
wacky postmodern stuff I’m into. There are plenty of conventional writers, such
as Tobias Wolff, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Richard Ford, who are challenging in
their own ways; especially recommended are Wolff’s story collection In the Garden of the North American Martyrs,
Phillips’ novel Shelter, and Ford’s novel Independence Day. But as far as what’s
pushing the envelope of fictional possibility, this weird stuff is where it’s
at.
—David
Wiley
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