William T. Vollmann

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Northern Exposure

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SOURCE: "Northern Exposure," in The Nation, New York, Vol. 258, No. 11, March 21, 1994, pp. 384-87.

[In the following review, Ulin claims that in The Rifles Vollmann does not fully develop his themes or his characters.]

I've often thought of William T. Vollmann as the oddball monk of American letters, a man who sits in a stark room creating his illuminated manuscripts (literally illuminated, since Vollmann's work routinely features maps and line drawings by the author, sketched in a primitive, if evocative, hand) twelve or fifteen hours a day, stopping only to go on fact-finding missions or to pick up a hooker and pretend that he's fallen in love. Actually, given Vollmann's avowed fascination—some might say obsession—with prostitutes and other denizens of the urban demimonde, the monk analogy doesn't hold up in any but the most abstract way. Yet when I consider his profligacy (since the appearance of his first novel, You Bright and Risen Angels, in 1987, Vollmann has churned out eight more books) or that at the age of 34 he's still at the beginning of what is already a major literary career dedicated in part to re-rendering a mythic past, the comparison seems apt, something that, in Vollmann's own words, may be "untrue based on the literal facts as we know them, but whose untruths further a deeper sense of truth."

For the past several years, Vollmann has been working on, among other things, what seems destined to be regarded as his masterpiece: Seven Dreams, a "symbolic history" of North America in as many projected volumes, which has as its central concern the corruption of traditional life styles by European explorers, beginning with the Norsemen who visited Greenland a thousand years ago. The first novel in the series, The Ice-Shirt, recounts the saga of those early Norse incursions; the second, Fathers and Crows, jumps ahead 500 years to take on the French settlement of eastern Canada and the conversion of the local Indians by the Jesuits. Here, Vollmann constructs a chilling picture of the clash of two cultures—a struggle exacerbated by the introduction of Christianity and firearms to the indigenous population and one that ultimately laid moral and material waste to societies that had flourished in the region for thousands of years.

Seven Dreams is a monumentally ambitious act of the imagination, combining fiction, myth and history to transform North America into a phantasmagorical dreamscape and the past into a "stream of time" that winds and rages and doubles back on itself, until meaning becomes as fluid as memory. As Vollmann explained in a recent issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction, "I've always been interested in Ovid's Metamorphoses, and from Ovid I got the idea that there had been a series of different ages on our continent, with each age being a little bit inferior to the age that preceded it…. In the first dream of The Ice-Shirt the Norse begin this process of degradation by introducing ice into 'Vinland' (what they called North America). The other dreams carry on different aspects of this motif until we end up at the present when everything is sort of concreted over."

On the surface, it's tempting to see Seven Dreams as somehow distinct from the rest of Vollmann's work, because its subject matter is so different from that of his other novels and stories. Those are for the most part gritty and almost willfully transgressive books that eschew history to troll the underworld of late twentieth-century society, particularly the author's own apparently lavish experience with streetwalkers, call girls and others who ply the sex trade in the red-light districts of the world. In the short novel Whores for Gloria, a man named Jimmy cruises San Francisco's Tenderloin district looking for the (possibly nonexistent) lover who deserted him, finally reinventing her out of whatever he can buy from the women of the streets, using their stories, their faces, even locks of their hair to complete the lost illusion of his love. In Butterfly Stories, Vollmann approaches the Far East through the same prism, writing about an American journalist who gives up everything for an illiterate Cambodian taxi dancer. And in The Rainbow Stories he mixes journalism with fiction to expose the lives of, among others, skinheads, punks and whores, investing their activities with a lucency that makes them worthy of, if not exactly our respect, then at least our compassion and our time.

Yet to parse Vollmann's work in such a way—putting his historical books on one side of an imaginary line and everything else on the other—is more facile than accurate, for all his writing fits into the same mosaic, pieced together with the same unsentimental intelligence, the same iconoclastic vision of the world. In both his "modern" texts and his Seven Dreams novels he works with difficult material (prostitution, colonialism) and relies on a mix of personal engagement and ironic distance, writing himself into his stories as both observer and participant. He uses his own experiences and copious research to create his simulacra, evoking a kind of heightened reality that is more allegorical than documentary truth alone. Thus, although Whores for Gloria's Jimmy may not seem to have much in common with, say, the Jesuit missionary (now Saint) Jean de Brebeuf, who figures so prominently in Fathers and Crows, what they share with each other—or for that matter, with Vollmann himself—is a need to connect with something larger than the quotidian, an almost hallucinogenic sense that what they see before them is not enough. And that, along with the author's unflinching refusal to judge either his characters or their fixations, gives his entire oeuvre a certain constancy, whether he's writing about the unrequited longing of a drifter, the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola or one of the countless gray areas in between.

Vollmann's latest novel, The Rifles, pushes the whole issue of constancy a step further, attempting to bring together his modern obsessions and his historical vision in a brand-new way. The third installment to be published in his Seven Dreams series—although it will be Volume Six in the finished work—The Rifles revolves around the fourth Arctic expedition of British explorer Sir John Franklin. This doomed voyage to find the Northwest Passage took place between 1845 and 1848 and resulted in death from starvation or exposure for each of the more than a hundred men involved. Equally important to the novel, though, are the adventures of one Captain Subzero, a Vollmann alter ego who in the late 1980s travels to the Canadian Arctic towns of Resolute Bay and Pond Inlet, where he falls in love with an Inuit woman named Reepah and discovers that, although more than 140 years separate them, he and John Franklin are one and the same.

This kind of involvement between author and character is part and parcel of the logic that informs Seven Dreams. In Fathers and Crows, Vollmann fantasized a link between himself and Kateri Tekakwitha, an Iroquois Indian baptized in 1676 who is now a candidate for sainthood, having been pious to the point of mortification during her lifetime. Here, however, the bond goes even deeper, beyond infatuation to the level of the soul. For Subzero is Franklin's literal reincarnation, and as such spends much of this novel engaged in time travel, jumping back and forth across the centuries from Reepah's house and his own Manhattan apartment to Franklin's ships, the Erebus and the Terror, as they make their way from Greenland to Beechey Island to the coast of King William Island, where they will ultimately become entombed in ice. One of the most arresting sections in The Rifles describes Subzero's own twelve-day journey, against all advice, to an abandoned weather station at Isachsen, just north of the North Magnetic Pole. Vollmann himself actually took such a trip in March 1991, in order to imagine what the last days of the Franklin expedition might have been like; but for Subzero, the voyage is about a more personal form of discovery, the forging of a concrete link between himself and Franklin, both of whom "did not learn from those who knew."

Largely because he avoids any New Age overtones, Vollmann begins to pull off the reincarnation idea, using it as a startling and direct method of joining up the present with the past. Especially early in the book, it serves as a seemingly natural segue from Subzero's meandering explorations to Franklin's own. In fact, Vollmann begins The Rifles with an extended meditation on Subzero, using his observations to formulate the novel's landscape: "a hard plain of stones, tan stones and grey stones, and the sea was just one more ridge away … the sea was emerald and drift-ice bobbed in it and there were bubbles and tunnels in those floes, which were shaped like ships and rams' heads and camels, and they rode the waves in herds and the water was so pure and clear and full of light that at 8:15 at night the sun was to the south, and in its track the ice was the color of the sea." It is only on page 48 that Franklin is introduced at all, and another fifty or so pages elapse before his story begins in earnest, after Subzero has consummated his relationship with Reepah, an act that will eventually destroy her and leave him, like so many of Vollmann's contemporary antiheroes, desperately in love and alone.

While a synthesis between Subzero and Franklin might be good in concept and an enjoyable exhibition at the start of the narrative, however, it fails to sustain itself as the rest of The Rifles unfolds. Part of the trouble is Vollmann's inability to integrate the modern and historical aspects of his novel continuously in organic fashion, making for what amounts to two separate narratives, one about the Inuit and Subzero's infatuation with Reepah, the other about Franklin's icebound journey of death.

Vollmann writes movingly about the effects of the Canadian government's decision in the early 1950s to relocate the Inuit from their homes in Inukjuak (or Port Harrison, as it is commonly known) to the more desolate reaches of the Arctic Circle, where towns and trading posts were created to reinforce Canada's territorial claims. He also describes with great empathy how Franklin's men slowly lost their minds, demented by exposure and poisoned by the lead in their canned supplies; some of the best and most relentless writing in this book recounts their increasing despondence, the way that "when the snow had come to stay, when it lay whorled in gigantic fingerprints between ship-ridges where the Arctic hares once came bustling, when it glittered with glare-constellations of frost, when it hardened until it merely creaked instead of giving under the men's steps, when it struck to their boots and froze to them immediately so that shaking or kicking or brushing or scraping scarcely dislodged it, then some men began to give up their hopes."

That's pretty lush language for such a barren environment, and it brings the frozen settings of The Rifles to life. But despite all his linguistic acuity, the metaphor Vollmann uses to connect his stories—that of the repeating rifle, and the way its introduction wreaked havoc on traditional Inuit hunting patterns, leaving the society uprooted from its surroundings and past—is underdeveloped, and remains unclear. Sure, the presence of firearms among the Inuit became its own kind of cultural lead poisoning; as Vollmann writes, "because iron axes had almost decided things in Vinland, because arquebuses had taken command at Kebec, what must rifles have done here?" Yet to what extent were Franklin and his men responsible, if they were responsible at all?

To Vollmann's credit, that's an issue he addresses head-on. "Mr. Franklin did not have so much to do with this," he writes about a third of the way through The Rifles. "The French in earlier times had known exactly what they were doing when they introduced firearms into Canada, but by Mr. Franklin's time the rifles were spreading faster than smallpox and it was too late to be anything but a dupe."

Even so, what can only be called the cursory nature of the Franklin sections of The Rifles makes the explorer's involvement in the novel problematic, to say the least. For in choosing to focus only on Franklin's fourth visit to the Arctic (by which time he was an old man, with most of his glory behind him), Vollmann denies us the expository background we need to know this character, who remains as elusive as the Arctic hare. That's also true of many of his expedition's participants, who, lacking any substantial development of their own, blend together, with little but their names to distinguish them. Occasionally, Vollmann does introduce brief disgressions detailing aspects of Franklin's earlier journeys; but these, too, lack the intensity we've come to expect from Seven Dreams, the sense of luxuriating in a long, fluid story line that takes its time. Instead, the historical explication is often rushed, which is unfortunate, since it leaves this book with an unfinished feeling, almost like an outline of what might have been.

It may seem odd to describe a book of more than 400 pages as sketchy; but in the end, that's how I feel about The Rifles, as if Vollmann could spare neither the space nor the time to meditate more fully on the parallels between Franklin and Subzero, between nineteenth-century Arctic explorers and their twentieth-century counterparts. In the acknowledgments for Fathers and Crows, the most rigorously conceived novel in the Seven Dreams sequence thus far, Vollmann claims that "this book … encountered such great difficulties on both sides of the Atlantic that at times I expected it to be published only in a mutilated form, if at all." And I have to wonder if that fear was reincarnated as he worked on The Rifles, and kept it from becoming another thousand-page epic. Of course, there's probably a simpler explanation, which is that the flaws here are a function of Vollmann's amorphous structure, of the dream logic that suffuses The Rifles, even more than his previous efforts, like a kind of spiritual shorthand. But whatever the reason, it's my sense that this novel should have been at least twice as long—if only to give its connections the room to take shape, to resound with the depth of the author's defiantly imagined universe, where truth is often just a matter of interpretation, and reality is always more than what it seems.

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