Happy New Year, Margo.
So much for the Season of Peace as we ride into 2004 with the nation still on high alert. Movie critic Stephen Holden caught the mood last week in The New York Times when, reflecting on the latest crop of holiday flicks, he renamed it the "Season of Tears and Blood." But "The Fog of War" and "Mystic River" are pikers compared to the latest from William T. Vollmann, novelist, philosopher king, and "part-time journalist of armed politics." His new "book" looks at our tendency to do each other harm and confronts a question with particular resonance right now: When is violence justified?
If this sounds like just another book about a timely topic, guess again. The project runs seven volumes and 5,000 pages, and it was basically in the box before 9/11 (although Vollmann mentions the tragedy and addresses Islamic resentment against America). Vollmann, who has risked his own skin in the killing fields of Cambodia, Bosnia, and other spots of hell around the globe, is no optimist about our ability to curb our violent tendencies. It's in the blood, he says.
"Rising Up and Rising Down" couldn't find a publisher until the quirky San Francisco-based McSweeney's Books took it on. For obvious reasons: The project editor, Eli Horowitz, says McSweeney's will be satisfied if it breaks even on its 3,500 print run. And this is possible not because production values were cut (the seven books come in a cloth-covered case) but because there's no marketing budget. Reviewers were asked to read the book on disk, and Horowitz depended on a horde of volunteer interns for fact-checking and other chores. In
the oral history compiled to describe the project, editor and best-selling author Dave Eggers notes that RURD, as it's called, took a toll on Horowitz, who was 24 when he started and is now 73. Only kidding, of course, but: "It's important that the book exist, and it wouldn't otherwise," says the youthful-sounding Horowitz. "It's a poster child for the kind of projects we take on."
RURD is audacious in its scope and ambition, compared in one review to James Frazer's 12-volume "Golden Bough" and in another to Winston Churchill's "History of the English-Speaking Peoples." And it's flawed, too. In spite of the attempt at a systematic approach to the huge amount of material it includes, holding together all the disparate parts — his reportage, philosophizing, his "moral matrix" for deciding when it's OK to do harm — is impossible. Sterling Clover got it right in the Village Voice when he said that, at its worst, RURD is "the most erudite dorm-room b—-s—-." But he goes on to say that, at its best, which is most of the time, RURD is imbued with a "certain lovely urgency."
The word "urgency" is striking: Vollmann's on-the-scene reporting is vivid and penetrating. But it's his conviction that matters most. In spite of all the skulls and bones and talk of death, "Rising Up" is not the work of a cynic, but of someone sad to the point of despair about our inhumanity to one another. These days we see such tremendous passion on both sides of the political spectrum, but so little in the media. The right-wing shock jocks operate not out of conviction, but with their eye on ratings. Vollmann is the real thing, a writer who cares deeply about his subject and the world.
Dear Ellen,
So glad to hear from you. I was picturing you shoveling your way out of all the snow that dropped on Portland when the new year was ushered in, but it looks like you have been plowing through something a lot less fluffy. Vollmann's seven-volume rumination on violence does, indeed, represent a welcome deviation from the usual bottom-line publishing enterprise these days. But it does seem ironic that it should be praised for its urgency, lovely or otherwise, when it was nearly 20 years in the making.
What it should be lauded for is its attempt at in-depth reporting and thinking. My problem with most of the passion that surfaces these days — whether from politicians, pundits, or writers, in newspapers, on television/radio, or in books — is that it provides more heat than light. I prefer your word "conviction," which implies something beyond simple emotion. Vollmann was on a search for answers. That not only takes time but a great deal of thought. It also demands that the thinker move beyond his or her usual boundaries, both geographical and mental.
Two books I have just read are good examples of how authors can begin with the same interesting premise, but ultimately take it to very different levels of understanding. Both Barry Schwartz, a professor of social theory and social action at Swarthmore College, and journalist Gregg Easterbrook have observed the same paradox at the heart of Western societies: People in the West are living at the pinnacle of human possibilty, they are awash in material abundance, yet they are unhappy. In "The Paradox of Choice" (Ecco/HarperCollins), Schwartz takes a look at this phenomenon and responds in typical self-help book fashion (with emphasis on the word "self"): He offers 11 solutions to help us manage all the choices laid before us.
Gregg Easterbrook in "The Progress Paradox" (Random House) also observes that people in the West "live in a favored age yet do not feel favored.'' But digging deeper than Schwartz, he goes beyond merely suggesting changes in the way we go about choosing. Probing the causes of the paradox, he questions the choices themselves, pointing out that our society is undergoing a fundamental shift from "material want" to "meaning want." And, as he points out, finding meaning is a lot harder than finding a car to buy.
So, yes, I applaud any and all who are willing to spend some time probing a subject as important as violence. It's not so much the length of Vollmann's enterprise that is impressive as it is the depth. Like the epigram by Robert Frost that Easterbrook chose to begin his book says: "Happiness makes up in height what it lacks in length."
Margo,
In Vollmanns case, the "urgency" comes not from his timeline but his earnestness, the exhaustive investment in a project that covers violence from Julius Caesar to the California prison system. As for the Prozac-popping era in which we live, I think "paradox" is a most appropriate word, not because it's the first time people have searched for meaning — wasn't Augustine rather into the idea himself? — but because it's cast against such blinding affluence. We depend on our consumerist ways even as we reject them. I'll disclaim materialism with the best of them, but I can't help feeling like a dog chewing its own tail. Does this mean I have to give up Starbucks?
I like Easterbrook's coining of the term "meaning want." The news media has a hard time getting its arms around this yearning because its charge is to report what can be quantified. But book publishers have plundered the "search for meaning" market with no holds barred. The Christian book market is on a tear. Buddhism is hot. Whether this reflects the anxiety of affluence, or new fears grounded in 9/11, SARS, and now mad cow disease, I don't know. But it seems clear that authors have tapped into readers' needs: Surely it's not just me who sees a connection between the huge sales for Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" and Mitch Albom's "Five People You Meet in Heaven" and the fact that both books appropriate religious themes.
"Rising Up and Rising Down" fits into this matrix because it's a moral mission, not just a publishing effort. In subject and ardor, it reflects the way we now live.
