William T. Vollmann

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Dream Factory

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SOURCE: "Dream Factory," in The New Republic, Vol. 210, No. 15, April 11, 1994, pp. 40-2, 44.

[Birkerts is an American critic and educator who has won numerous awards and grants for his essays on literature. In the following review of Butterfly Stories, he praises Vollmann's evocation of the main character's perspective and states of mind, arguing that, though the plot at times "strains credulity," the poignancy and dreamlike quality of the narration imbue the novel with credibility and authenticity.]

William Vollmann is the kind of writer who sets other writers to calculating—totting up published pages and dividing by the guesswork figure of years spent at the desk. My math, which takes into account six novels (including the one under review and his most recent book, The Rifles), two story collections and a travelogue/documentary, tells me that over a ten-year period Vollmann will have brought into print some 5,000 pages of prose: a Balzacian rate of production. The fingertips prickle at the thought of so much typing (or processing). And the reader, no longer buying the idea that he should be grateful for any and all artistic bounty, rebels. He wants to hear that much of the work is just that—typing—and can safely be disregarded.

So far as I have read, and so far as I can judge, it cannot. Though he is prolific in the extreme, there is little contaminating sense of haste in the prose. Vollmann is an attentive architect of sentences and paragraphs, and even the longest of his books, Fathers and Crows (the second part of his projected seven-part novelized history of North America), which runs to nearly 1,000 pages with appendices, reflects in its rhythms and diction a quick ear and a finelyhoned sense of particulars. The prose is sometimes excessive, and suffers from imbalance (too many repetitions, too much data); but Vollmann cannot be written off. He is a peculiarly possessed talent, a computer-using descendant of the tribe of exalted scribblers, very likely living with his fingers on the keyboard not because he wants to be famous or rewarded, but because he feels the pressure—now specific, now maddeningly inchoate—of some vast inspiration.

Except he doesn't just live with his fingers on the keyboard. His obsessions—with the historical collision of cultures as well as with contemporary denizens of subcultures, with whores and street people and skinheads—have led him, globally, to Afghanistan, Sarajevo and the Arctic wilderness; and more locally into the dark hives of San Francisco's Tenderloin district. Moreover, to judge from references incorporated throughout the work, he has devoured libraries of books, on everything from Icelandic sagas to recondite military procedures. Reading over the capsule biographies on Vollmann's various books we get the feeling that there may also be a bit of myth-making going on.

The Vollmann oeuvre embraces what appear to be two distinct projects, one of them the Seven Dreams series, of which Vollmann has published The Ice Shirt, Fathers and Crows and now The Rifles. These are large-scale, deeply researched and energetically executed panels from North American history. They reflect, respectively, the tenth-century encounter of the Norse explorers and the indigenous Indian populations; the seventeenth-century Jesuit missions in Canada; and the early nineteenth-century search by traders for the Northwest passage. The works are episodic, in places collagelike, and they are busy with idiosyncratic intrusions—Vollmann's elaborate, hand-drawn title pages, his illustrations and manifold glossaries and appendices, his sudden injection of present-day observations. We have no doubt but that this is a writer on a mission, a world revisionist, a figure who would be easier to slot as a crank if he were not still in his mid-30s.

Interspersed among the historical sagas are Vollmann's books of short fiction, which include The Rainbow Stories and Thirteen Stories, Thirteen Epitaphs, and his novel Whores for Gloria. All are portraits of life in extremis. Vollmann is not interested in bridging the gap between society and its excluded members. He is not leading readers to the reassuring recognition that these are, deep down, people just like us, or even "There but for the grace of God go I …" Rather, he brazenly pushes their otherness in our faces. As if to say, "Look at these people, these whores and drifters and dying war veterans. You cannot begin to imagine what they do in their day or how the world looks through their eyes." Roughly, unevenly and with a sometimes punkishly deliberate bad taste—glorying a bit in his self-appointed messenger status—Vollmann tries to pry his way in past the reader's armor, to thwart the easy empathic reflex. He would have us recognize that there are things in this world that cannot be assimilated to our concern, that sometimes anarchy and perversity just are. Reading these stories, we feel that the lower depths may be stranger and more disturbingly various than we had allowed.

Butterfly Stories: A Novel is something new for the author. He has used the composition-by-panel procedure to forge a work that, as the title suggests, hovers between genres. In eight chapters—some only a few pages long, one comprising 137 numbered sections—he relates the story of a man known first, in childhood, as "the butterfly boy" (presumably because of his delicacy), then as "the journalist" and finally as "the husband." The book is, in many ways, the working through of a somewhat rudimentary premise, one sketched out in the course of a recent interview, in which Vollmann remarks: "The little kids on the playground who are picked on by the bullies don't grow up being saints as a result of having been martyrs early." Vollmann nowhere indicates that this is his premise, but since the novel's first section. "The Butterfly Boy," presents the protagonist as the hapless victim of a schoolyard tormentor, we feel justified in taking the comment as a cue.

Vollmann's playground is a kind of primeval laboratory. The butterfly boy is sensitive, bereft of the necessary social defenses—he faces the world with a wide-open innocence and violates the laws of school-boy society by liking little girls. The bully, possibly retarded, is a volatile chunk of menace. "The substance that his soul was composed of was pain. Since the most basic pleasure of substance is to see or dream or replicate itself, the bully fulfilled himself by causing pain in others." But one day the butterfly boy, his main victim, is saved from the customary tortures by the intercession of an older girl—she trounces the bully decisively. Thereupon the other kids gather around and force the boy to kiss his rescuer:

He kissed her the only way he knew how, as he would have kissed his mother's cheek or his aunt's cheek or the cheek of any of the nice ladies who came to visit. (The other boys made loud noises of revulsion.) He felt something happening to her but he did not understand what it was. He said: I love you.

Then she was squeezing him back in tight defiance:—I love you, too, she said.

A few minutes later, when they are alone, the girl asks: "Are we going to get married?" Vollmann writes: "This eventuality had not occurred to the butterfly boy before, but now that she had said it, it became the only conceivable choice. He nodded."

Here, in emblematic miniature (also in purer form), is the whole of the novel—its brutal backdrop, its unexpected emotional rescue and its naïve tenderness. At the same time the scene is presented as a first cause: this is the root of violence and grace from which will grow the twisted stalk, the obsession that will finally claim the butterfly boy. The psychological stepping stones are oddly placed, however, and we are forced to make some wild guesses about the development of the boy's character. In the next section, where he is called "the boy who wanted to be a journalist," we see him first flirting with suicide—halfhearted cuts on the wrist—then traveling by train through Eastern Europe with a lesbian he claims to love.

We extend good faith and ride along, but it is not until the next section, titled "More Benadryl, Whined the Journalist," that the narrative settles into coherence. This longest of the novel's chapters opens on a less than lyrical note:

Once upon a time a journalist and a photographer set out to whore their way across Asia. They got a New York magazine to pay for it. They each armed themselves with a tube of cool, soft K-Y jelly and a box of Trojans.

It seems that Vollmann is trying to see just how far he can épater the P.C.-niks. Is this to be some kind of anti-legend for the Age of AIDS—two grown men roaring goggle-eyed through the fleshpots of Thailand and Cambodia, probing both the extent of their lust and the depth of their cynicism?

At first it seems so. The two start their pilgrimage at a Bangkok bar called "The Soy Cowboy," where they pick partners from a group of Cambodian girls with names like Oy and Toy. The sexual descriptions are stark, and we brace ourselves for what promises to be an ever more sordid series of encounters. But then there is a catch in the momentum. The journalist believes that he has injured his girl; he is suddenly overcome with remorse and self-loathing. And we recall—for we had forgotten—that this is the butterfly boy grown up. Vulnerability like his does not get burned away by hard times and hard knocks. We now accept that he gives the girl a large sum extra so that she can see a doctor, and that he tells himself that he deserves to get AIDS. Nor are we surprised when, soon after, he begins to experience strange pains and swellings in his groin. Only the photographer, his crude foil, will reject this drama of sin and penance. When the journalist wonders about the morality of their undertaking, the other cuts him short. "We're giving them money, aren't we?"

The narrative jerks forward in abbreviated chunks, almost like a length of film being hand-pulled through an editing machine. More days and nights in The Soy Cowboy, some anxiety-inducing flashes: "A girl in a blindingly-white T-shirt came in, and then another. They leaned on the bar on that hot afternoon, talking, while the spots of discolight began to move and the fan bulged round and round like a roving eye." Vollmann saturates us with atmospheres, rancid and rancorous, until we are pulled into place, suffering moods along with the journalist, staring jadedly at the photographer and his girl in the next bed. From his perceptions alone we start to understand that our protagonist is a man enduring considerable torment. "Whatever path he chose," writes Vollmann, "he was lonely for other paths." He is like Kierkegaard's seducer, an individual caught up in the joyless rotation of sensation, who is in despair without himself quite knowing it.

But he will—and this is Vollmann's unusual gambit—end up as a man who breaks free of the circuit, who by way of improbable circumstance (or should we call it destiny?) advances to the philosopher's ethical stage, the mark of which is the willingness to commit the self. The improbability: that journalist and photographer travel to Cambodia, where, out of the blue, and with little seeming reason, the journalist falls in love with a whore named Vanna. There are no fireworks. We witness another routine transaction, a gestural fumbling outside the reach of language. But somewhere in the midst of it all, the man discovers an attachment:

She almost never smiled. Once again that night she traced an invisible bracelet around her wrist, then his. He watched her sleeping. In the middle of the night he pulled her on top of him just to hug her more tightly, and she seemed no heavier than the blanket.

Clearly need and loneliness are what awaken his heart. But for the lover it is the effect, and not the cause, that matters. Soon after their first night together the journalist takes Vanna to the jewelry market and buys her a gold bracelet. This, according to local lore, binds them in something very much like marriage.

The two lovers spend several days together, communicating by way of a man called "the English teacher" (who massacres the language more than he ministers to it), enjoying a blithe simplicity: "Her hand and face were amazed at the ice cube tray in the freezer, he knocked a cube out for her and she crunched it happily between her teeth. She was finally laughing and smiling and going pssst!…"

But then the travelers have to return to Thailand. The journalist is genuinely heartsick to leave Vanna, and the feeling grows rather than diminishes. He tries the Bangkok whores again but the contact only intensifies his sense of loss. Worse, his pains and swellings return; he knows that his body is turning on him. One rainy night, shortly before they are to fly back to the States, he tries to kill himself: "The dirty walls, splattered with the blood of squashed bugs, seemed his own walls, his soul's skin and prison. How could he set his butterfly free? Then he remembered the Benadryl, and smiled."

But the end will not come so easily. The journalist is found, saved and put on the plane home: he is ready to begin the most urgent, and final, leg of his journey. Back in America, the journalist—now called "the husband" because he has pledged his troth to Vanna—moves around in a state of active despair. Feeling that his health is breaking down, he gets himself examined. Meanwhile, his American marriage, which we learn about with a certain surprise, collapses completely. Letters of inquiry to Cambodia come back with the same unvarying message: Vanna's whereabouts are unknown. The husband is sure that she has been picked up by the Khmer Rouge; he fears for her life. Then comes the final blow. His test results confirm that he is HIV positive, that his days are numbered.

The husband makes a last frantic bid to get back to Asia. And then, without much transition, he is there, approaching the checkpoints at the Cambodian border—a dying man heading into the land of death. With his head full of terrifying hallucinations, he sneaks past the guards, almost making it to safety before the hands of his captors close around him. The novel ends as he is being led toward a cage. It is given to him to behold a luminous apparition of his beloved:

She was looking on him full at last with that sweet soft pale smooth delicate face of hers, open and trusting, smiling—really smiling!—a pouty little smile like a kiss, her gold chain necklace coming shooting out of chin-shadow with the heart lying on her thin bluish-white blouse just above her breasts, inverted-V eyebrows seeming to question him a little as she smiled; the recognition of him took up her whole face as she sat waiting for him with that sad smile; he was hers; soon he'd be sleeping beside her forever.

Vollmann has thrown down a truly daunting set of hurdles. There are so many grounds on which Butterfly Stories invites dismissal—the schematic and somewhat hackneyed psychological premise (the self-alienated protagonist finding redemption through immersion in the "other"), the deep improbability of his awakening to love in the arms of a young Cambodian prostitute, not to mention the starkly graphic and conventionally debasing sexual descriptions, which almost feel calculated to offend. It is as if Vollmann, out of cynicism or perversity, or in the way of certain new-wave cartoonists who draw with deliberate ungainliness, had decided to push against the grain of the aesthetic; and not as a humble rejection of refinements, but rather out of a supreme confidence that his material was so urgent and authentic that it would survive anyway.

Whether or not this was Vollmann's impulse doesn't finally matter that much. What matters is that he has, to a significant degree, succeeded. He has smelted from his most unlikely materials a small but potentially glowing bit of radium. He has—and this is no mean feat—put us in touch with a soul, a credible entity that does not feel placed on the page but rather seems to emerge from it. Our more cautious literary sense denies this possibility, but sense be damned, there it is.

Vollmann's narrative may clatter in fits and starts over the sprockets, but the language itself is charged and weaves a spell. It not only delineates the character of the journalist, but inveigles us into an intimacy. At times staccato, at other times uncoiling into dreamy lyricism, the prose gives a convincing rendition of exacerbated inwardness:

You can notch the fish's fin, harden the removed bit of tissue with epoxy, and then slice it with a diamond saw, slice it thin for the microscope. Now turn the brass knob on the stem, your eye gazing passionlessly into that other world that used to be a fish; when it comes into focus you'll see the fish's age straightaway; it's just like counting tree-rings; it's no different than half-listening to the interpreter explaining the difference between Soviet pistols … while gazing out the car window at the houses on stilts over the squishy river, houses connected by gangplanks; you can see the people inside looking out; there is no privacy. That's how it must be for those mercilessly illuminated fish-cells. When he was 6 or 7 his parents told him that he was a big boy, but he got sick and then he was little; they wouldn't use the oral thermometer. They made him pull down his pants on the bed and then the anal thermometer went in, cool and greasy. The whole world saw. He lay still. When they pulled it out and told him that he could move, he continued to lie there with his face in the pillow. He'd gone out of himself; the worst thing now would be if anyone saw him coming back into himself; then that would prove that this thing had happened. But you do it; you look, see, stare, observe, count, measure and categorize. You have to do it! You suck into your eyes the naked children squatting in the mud, coffee-colored puddles in the muddy road, grass-roofed wooden booths in the mud. You match the numbers, my dear technicians. HIV ANTIBODIES PRESENT.

Usually we are counseled to trust the tale, not the teller. Here it is the reverse. The tale strains credulity, but the teller, in setting down the journalist's perceptions, his associations, his often under-defended feelings, makes him distressingly known to us. The journalist is a boy-man, really, a case of arrested development, and under the often sordid surface narrative we hear his voice. In time it overtakes us, convinces us—as does any worthy fictional creation—that within the confines of the book his truth is absolute. The oddness of the plot feels oddly beside the point, as do some of the sequences we follow in our dreams. And indeed, the strange electricity of dreams flickers through these pages, inducing, when we finish, some of the disorientation that sudden awakenings can bring.

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