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Rising Up and Rising Down #3
Rising Up and Rising Down, Volume II
556 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 2003
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25 people want to read
About the author
William T. Vollmann
99 books1,454 followersWilliam Tanner Vollmann is an American author, journalist, and essayist known for his ambitious and often unconventional literary works. Born on July 28, 1959, in Los Angeles, California, Vollmann has earned a reputation as one of the most prolific and daring writers of his generation.
Vollmann's early life was marked by tragedy; his sister drowned when he was a child, an event that profoundly impacted him and influenced his writing. He attended Deep Springs College, a small, isolated liberal arts college in California, before transferring to Cornell University, where he studied comparative literature. After college, Vollmann spent some time in Afghanistan as a freelance journalist, an experience that would later inform some of his works.
His first novel, You Bright and Risen Angels (1987), is a sprawling, experimental work that blends fantasy, history, and social commentary. This novel set the tone for much of his later work, characterized by its complexity, depth, and a willingness to tackle difficult and controversial subjects.
Vollmann's most acclaimed work is The Rainbow Stories (1989), a collection of interlinked short stories that explore the darker sides of human nature. His nonfiction is equally notable, particularly Rising Up and Rising Down (2003), a seven-volume treatise on violence, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Over the years, Vollmann has continued to write prolifically, producing novels, short stories, essays, and journalistic pieces. His work often delves into themes of violence, poverty, and the struggles of marginalized people. He has received several awards, including the National Book Award for Fiction in 2005 for Europe Central, a novel about the moral dilemmas faced by individuals during World War II.
Vollmann is known for his immersive research methods, often placing himself in dangerous situations to better understand his subjects. Despite his literary success, he remains somewhat of an outsider in the literary world, frequently shunning public appearances and maintaining a low profile.
In addition to his writing, Vollmann is also an accomplished photographer, and his photographs often accompany his written work. Painting is also an art where's working on, celebrating expositions in the United States, showing his paintings. His diverse interests and unflinching approach to his subjects have made him a unique voice in contemporary American literature.
Vollmann's early life was marked by tragedy; his sister drowned when he was a child, an event that profoundly impacted him and influenced his writing. He attended Deep Springs College, a small, isolated liberal arts college in California, before transferring to Cornell University, where he studied comparative literature. After college, Vollmann spent some time in Afghanistan as a freelance journalist, an experience that would later inform some of his works.
His first novel, You Bright and Risen Angels (1987), is a sprawling, experimental work that blends fantasy, history, and social commentary. This novel set the tone for much of his later work, characterized by its complexity, depth, and a willingness to tackle difficult and controversial subjects.
Vollmann's most acclaimed work is The Rainbow Stories (1989), a collection of interlinked short stories that explore the darker sides of human nature. His nonfiction is equally notable, particularly Rising Up and Rising Down (2003), a seven-volume treatise on violence, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Over the years, Vollmann has continued to write prolifically, producing novels, short stories, essays, and journalistic pieces. His work often delves into themes of violence, poverty, and the struggles of marginalized people. He has received several awards, including the National Book Award for Fiction in 2005 for Europe Central, a novel about the moral dilemmas faced by individuals during World War II.
Vollmann is known for his immersive research methods, often placing himself in dangerous situations to better understand his subjects. Despite his literary success, he remains somewhat of an outsider in the literary world, frequently shunning public appearances and maintaining a low profile.
In addition to his writing, Vollmann is also an accomplished photographer, and his photographs often accompany his written work. Painting is also an art where's working on, celebrating expositions in the United States, showing his paintings. His diverse interests and unflinching approach to his subjects have made him a unique voice in contemporary American literature.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
February 1, 2024
GREATEST LIVING AMERICAN WRITER ON THIS THERE CAN BE NO DEBATE
December 26, 2025
After a five star first volume, I did not expect this. Genuinely disappointed in some of his conclusion and his misrepresentation of certain ideologies.
To get the okay parts out of the way:
Defense of Authority was good. Probably the best part of this all. But I also surprisingly have nothing to say about it.
Defense of Honor was interesting but rather unimportant in the grand scheme of things. I get that he has to tackle all these facets and that honor is important to many, so it was necessary. I just found it kind of dull.
Defense of Creed was irrelevant but interesting. Again, it's one of those things he had to cover but that I do not find much overall importance in.
These three sections, despite me not finding them too interesting, are worth reading. Vollmann's research on certain historical events and tracking the moralities behind them is astonishing. While I personally was not always enthralled, I did get great history lessons and I think that other people would do the same.
Now for the bad:
Defense of Race and Defense of Class
Vollmann, until reading these sections from the book always read to me like someone with very left-wing politics. Maybe not an outright communist, but on the legit left. Now I believe anything but. First of all, Vollmann seems more content with maintaining pacifistic order unless there would be direct and immediate change made. For Defense of Race, I am not as well read in these scenarios so let it just be said that while he gets a lot of it right, his distaste for political violence a la Black Panthers/Malcolm X makes me genuinely question where his loyalties lie. Secondly, with Defense of Class, he completely misclassifies every aspect of Marxism and even Stalinism to an extent. This is not my own politics speaking - this is objective fact. He does not get much of Marx right and sometimes construes Marxism with Leninism (yes, these have now merged, but that is not what he was referring to). He leaves out important historical context for many aspects of the Soviet Union. I could go on... He seems to find justifications for defense of honor and authority moreso than he does class.
I love Vollmann's fiction and I think Vollmann is one of the most talented writers and empathetic souls. I will always continue to read him and I will even continue this set of volumes. But it will be through a new lens. Vollmann is an anti-communist at heart which always has fascistic undertones. I know he is not a fascist - anything but. However, the inability to see merit in class action or revolution while seemingly willfully misrepresenting facts and philosophies is dangerous. It is irresponsible and someone as brilliant as him should know better. I find it hard to believe that some of this was not willful given his propensity to completely understanding topics. I wish he could go back and see the exploited classes from his previous novels - the sex workers, the drug addicts, the derelicts, the oppressed - and tell them that revolution is almost always unjustified.
Edit: I will give him the benefit of the doubt that this work was written from the very early 80s though the early 2000s. Much of it he was young and less well versed for and information regarding certain topics may have been harder to objectively read. But nonetheless.
To get the okay parts out of the way:
Defense of Authority was good. Probably the best part of this all. But I also surprisingly have nothing to say about it.
Defense of Honor was interesting but rather unimportant in the grand scheme of things. I get that he has to tackle all these facets and that honor is important to many, so it was necessary. I just found it kind of dull.
Defense of Creed was irrelevant but interesting. Again, it's one of those things he had to cover but that I do not find much overall importance in.
These three sections, despite me not finding them too interesting, are worth reading. Vollmann's research on certain historical events and tracking the moralities behind them is astonishing. While I personally was not always enthralled, I did get great history lessons and I think that other people would do the same.
Now for the bad:
Defense of Race and Defense of Class
Vollmann, until reading these sections from the book always read to me like someone with very left-wing politics. Maybe not an outright communist, but on the legit left. Now I believe anything but. First of all, Vollmann seems more content with maintaining pacifistic order unless there would be direct and immediate change made. For Defense of Race, I am not as well read in these scenarios so let it just be said that while he gets a lot of it right, his distaste for political violence a la Black Panthers/Malcolm X makes me genuinely question where his loyalties lie. Secondly, with Defense of Class, he completely misclassifies every aspect of Marxism and even Stalinism to an extent. This is not my own politics speaking - this is objective fact. He does not get much of Marx right and sometimes construes Marxism with Leninism (yes, these have now merged, but that is not what he was referring to). He leaves out important historical context for many aspects of the Soviet Union. I could go on... He seems to find justifications for defense of honor and authority moreso than he does class.
I love Vollmann's fiction and I think Vollmann is one of the most talented writers and empathetic souls. I will always continue to read him and I will even continue this set of volumes. But it will be through a new lens. Vollmann is an anti-communist at heart which always has fascistic undertones. I know he is not a fascist - anything but. However, the inability to see merit in class action or revolution while seemingly willfully misrepresenting facts and philosophies is dangerous. It is irresponsible and someone as brilliant as him should know better. I find it hard to believe that some of this was not willful given his propensity to completely understanding topics. I wish he could go back and see the exploited classes from his previous novels - the sex workers, the drug addicts, the derelicts, the oppressed - and tell them that revolution is almost always unjustified.
Edit: I will give him the benefit of the doubt that this work was written from the very early 80s though the early 2000s. Much of it he was young and less well versed for and information regarding certain topics may have been harder to objectively read. But nonetheless.
July 31, 2024
Note: this review covers the complete and unabridged work known as Rising Up and Rising Down, including content from all seven volumes.
“History shambles on! What are we left with? A few half-shattered Greek stelae; Trotsky's eyeglasses; Gandhi's native-spun cloth, Cortes' pieces of solid gold (extorted from their original owner, Montezuma); a little heap of orange peels left on the table by the late Robespierre; John Brown's lengthily underlined letters; Lenin's bottles of invisible ink; one of Di Giovanni's suitcases, with an iron cylinder of gelignite and two glass tubes of acid inside; the Constitution of the Ku Klux Klan; a bruised ear (Napoleon pinched it with loving condescension)... And dead bodies, of course. (They sing about John Brown's body.) Memoirs, manifestoes, civil codes, trial proceedings, photographs, statues, weapons now aestheticized by that selfsame history - the sword of Frederick the Great, and God knows what else. Then dust blows out of fresh graves, and the orange peels go grey, sink, wither, rot away. Sooner or later, every murder becomes quaint. Charlemagne hanged four and a half thousand "rebels" in a single day, but he has achieved a storybook benevolence. And that's only natural: historiography begins after the orange has been sucked,; the peeler believes in the "great and beautiful things," or wants to believe; easy for us to believe likewise, since dust reduced truth and counterfeit to the same greyness - caveat emptor. But ends remain fresh, and means remain inexplicable.”
What is violence? Why do we hurt each other? What can be done? And who is my enemy, and who is my neighbor? After a decade of research both in the stacks as a haunter of archives and in the field as a conflict journalist, William T. Vollmann has four thousand pages of answers.
Many were the summer afternoons I sat on a countertop with a volume from this book in my lap and a tangerine popsicle in hand. Many were the summer nights I stayed up listening to Suicide’s “A Way of Life” while reading this book by flashlight. Often I felt exhilarated, affected, changed. Occasionally I wondered why I was doing this to myself. Mostly I was enlightened.
Rising Up and Rising Down begins with a slim volume of introductions, both an overview of the work and a sort of user’s manual that lays out what it will require of the reader. Vollmann begins with three meditations on death, presented in reverse: first, burial in the Paris Catacombs, followed by the autopsy in a dismal Sacramento facility, concluded at a war-ruined hospital in former Yugoslavia. His uncompromising and singular vision of death pulls the skeletons out of the walls of the catacombs and puts them back together, pulls bodies off the coroner’s table, rips the bullets out of their bodies, sends them back to the barrel of the gun, reverses the muzzle flash, un-pulls the trigger, to find the exact moment violence begins. (“Death is ordinary. Behold it, subtract its patterns and lessons from those of the death that weapons bring, and maybe the residue will show what violence is.”) His focus moves to the gun itself, as he examines the aesthetics and morality of weapons. Behind the sights, clutching the weapon, stands the user: he is the lonely atom, whose existence and rights must be defined and qualified. What means and ends are legitimately available to the individual? And how does the lovely atom protect the woman he loves when she is alone in the dark and crawling night of a park in Sacramento? Never mind his obligations to submit to authority; the lonely atom, the writer, sits at the kitchen table while he cleans and loads his gun.
I would define the next sections as the theoretical component of this work, including volumes II, III, and IV. These comprise of a deeply referential and sometimes discursive examination of the justifications which moral actors, alone or in groups, may use to legitimize or explain their violence. Defense of Honor, for instance, gives is Joan of Arc burning at the stake and Mao’s doctor caught in a bind between loyalty and dishonor. Is legitimate authority justified in putting them to death or under pressure of losing their life for the ideals of honor. And what of Defense or Class, making ants of humans, placing us in a multi-tiered nest layered like a cake, a cake baked with flour made from the wheat stolen by Lenin and Stalin from the kulaks, who surely deserved to die for their crimes against class, which was to say owning two cattle… didn’t they, comrade? Defense of Authority remains in the USSR, comparing and contrasting Trotsky’s dirty razor of loyalty with Lincoln’s domination of the Confederate rebellion; ice axe, bullet, it’s all the same: isn’t it interesting that both had the back of their skulls cracked open by metal in the end? And what of the heart of the Civil War, John Brown and the Harper’s Ferry uprising? What can we mere mortals glean from the clash of the god-emperors at Tenochtitlán? Defense of War Aims brings us to the hamlets of Mỹ Lai 4 and Mỹ Khe 4; Defense of Homeland, to the front line between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. Defense of the Earth and Animals recalls in equal measure John Muir and the old man in greyish kamiks, tree-spiking ecoterrorists in the Pacific Northwest and the bludgeoning of seals by an Inuk rifleman. Defense of Gender invokes the voiceless and invisible Afghani women begging by the side of the road and Danny Rolling as a disturbed Achilles with a craven thirst for power over others. Defense against Traitors asks the Viet Cong why their shining ideal required the beheading a young mother; Defense of the Revolution asks Robespierre why his required the same a thousand times over. Moral actors are also asked to defend their instincts: Pancho Villa’s deterrence, Lawrence of Arabia’s retribution, Odysseus’s revenge. The FBI of Ruby Ridge and Waco get their say; how would they feel knowing that giggling De Sade’s word is as good as theirs? And so the theoretical half of Rising Up and Rising Down ends with the fate of the victims: the sick and dying withering away in sanctioned hospitals, victims of land mines which exploded three decades after the treaties were signed, and child soldiers who are forced to fight and must pay the bailiff’s toll all the same. Above all else we must remember the victim.
Following theory is what I’ll call the praxis sections of the novel, divided up by region rather than chronology, depicting Vollmann’s career as a conflict journalist throughout the 90’s and early 2000’s. In Southeast Asia, he goes with Vanna to see the skulls on the shelves of the Khmer Rouge torture sites, bribes generals to find out if Pol Pot is alive, and then returns to America, where the impoverished children of Cambodian refugees have settled in Los Angeles’s worst neighborhoods. Every day they are victimized by other youth gangs, and by each other. They are the last generation. In Thailand, rogue journalist Ken Miller helps him steal a young girl from a brothel and smuggle her into a school for rescue and rehabilitation. In Burma he crosses borders and opium poppy fields to interview Khun Sa, the Opium King, target of thirty attempted assassinations by our government. In Africa, visiting Madagascar and the Democratic Republic of Congo, he enters a world of constant class conflict where no one is safe from robbing and extortion on the street. The Muslim World takes him from a requisitioned stadium in Somalia filled with American Marines and personnel carriers to Malaysia, where the PULO’s bombs are kept quiet by the government, a symbolic terror group denied symbolism and aesthetic recognition, led by the calm and collected and mercurial Old Man. In Iraq, our sanctions starve, and every interview is tense and taut; Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, meanwhile, receives him warmly, with their hands on their hearts. In North America, he explores Apache Reservations struck by an epidemic of contagious suicide, interviews and shoots with Ted Nugent, and becomes incensed at the sight of media vultures and political activists and Scientologists all advertising themselves at Columbine. In Jamaica, neighborhoods clash with neighborhoods in a roving cycle of betrayal and justification, while he must stand by. In South America, Colombia’s guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries confuse and exhaust him, and steal his father’s old watch. Vollmann’s darkest exploration of praxis is in Europe, where he documents the civil wars of former Yugoslavia. He travels with the radical Vineta, has his life threatened by Serbian militants holding a bayonet to his throat, and crosses the melted-steel bridges in the burned-out cities. In Sarajevo he finds himself trapped in a tower of dorm apartments, under siege every night by snipers across the road, with supplies dwindling. The path of the Balkans leads him inexorably to Mostar, where his two friends and he take a fatal detour. A sniper takes their lives and spares his, or else a land mine, or perhaps both, and he’s trembling with shock in the backseat and then he’s talking to the irregulars who storm to up to the car and later he’s wandering around the United Nations hospital sucking the juice from the oranges that were in the trunk of the car. (This is certainly the origin of the occasional motif of oranges scattered throughout the work.) The gauntlet of Yugoslavia informs further work, sections of The Atlas and Last Stories and Other Stories, which I count among the very best of his entire career. Told journalistically through his eyes it clarifies much about his stories and obfuscates yet more. In this regard it is perfect.
The final section of the praxis-based journalism is, I think, neglected by most reviewers who praise this work. I’d prefer to call it the predictions, as the final three case studies (labeled as “Perception and Irrationality”) seem to prefigure the future. In Japan, the “thick-blooded” underclass is placed in a position of racial impurity solely based on the area in which they were born; this merging of class and race may predict the future of marginalization. He goes off the grid and interviews Bo Gritz, major property developer and populist presidential candidate beloved by the right, prefiguring the rise of Donald Trump. Gritz, over the course of his hundred-page interview, subtly twists the book into a postmodern mystery story: like Vollmann, he claims to have interviewed Khun Sa. The connections of his intelligence career links the American right and gun culture from the North American sections to the global patterns in revolution and police action. How much of Vollmann’s journey was influenced by intelligence agencies, who invisibly profiled him as a potential terrorist (Notoriously, they thought he was the Unabomber - but if you’ve made it this far you probably already knew that.) and does that change or even strengthen the ethos of his life’s work? I certainly think it does. The monumental work ends with Vollmann’s attempt to understand the magic and mystery of New Orleans voodoo and Santería; ghosts and spirits are among the residue death leaves behind, giving a phantasmagorical quality to what we trace in the chalk outlines of means and ends. We discover new ways to kill; war is just a shot away. We discover new reasons to kill; our nations grind their teeth and salivate at the thought of destroying each other. We all have our futures and our fates; we are moral actors, haunted by what came before, but we are not powerless: we all have a choice to make.
Perhaps most affectingly, this work is also a sort of memoir; each profile of a historical moral actor is also a rumination on the writer’s own choices and future. He wrote it as a guidebook for the next generations to more wisely analyze the choices they make. I am a member of the first generation to grow up alongside it. (The book is older than me, but not by much.) As every father, he wanted to make a better world for his daughter. Why did he have to lose her?
But no matter. History shambles on. In the blue-black heart of distant smoldering battlefields and the smooth white marble edifices of our government, in abandoned inner cities and pleasant suburban homes, we are condemned to contradiction: history will make turncoats of us all, as we are concurrently doves reaching for the heavens and hammers smashing into the ground, the duration of our fleeting lives spent rising up and rising down.
“History shambles on! What are we left with? A few half-shattered Greek stelae; Trotsky's eyeglasses; Gandhi's native-spun cloth, Cortes' pieces of solid gold (extorted from their original owner, Montezuma); a little heap of orange peels left on the table by the late Robespierre; John Brown's lengthily underlined letters; Lenin's bottles of invisible ink; one of Di Giovanni's suitcases, with an iron cylinder of gelignite and two glass tubes of acid inside; the Constitution of the Ku Klux Klan; a bruised ear (Napoleon pinched it with loving condescension)... And dead bodies, of course. (They sing about John Brown's body.) Memoirs, manifestoes, civil codes, trial proceedings, photographs, statues, weapons now aestheticized by that selfsame history - the sword of Frederick the Great, and God knows what else. Then dust blows out of fresh graves, and the orange peels go grey, sink, wither, rot away. Sooner or later, every murder becomes quaint. Charlemagne hanged four and a half thousand "rebels" in a single day, but he has achieved a storybook benevolence. And that's only natural: historiography begins after the orange has been sucked,; the peeler believes in the "great and beautiful things," or wants to believe; easy for us to believe likewise, since dust reduced truth and counterfeit to the same greyness - caveat emptor. But ends remain fresh, and means remain inexplicable.”
What is violence? Why do we hurt each other? What can be done? And who is my enemy, and who is my neighbor? After a decade of research both in the stacks as a haunter of archives and in the field as a conflict journalist, William T. Vollmann has four thousand pages of answers.
Many were the summer afternoons I sat on a countertop with a volume from this book in my lap and a tangerine popsicle in hand. Many were the summer nights I stayed up listening to Suicide’s “A Way of Life” while reading this book by flashlight. Often I felt exhilarated, affected, changed. Occasionally I wondered why I was doing this to myself. Mostly I was enlightened.
Rising Up and Rising Down begins with a slim volume of introductions, both an overview of the work and a sort of user’s manual that lays out what it will require of the reader. Vollmann begins with three meditations on death, presented in reverse: first, burial in the Paris Catacombs, followed by the autopsy in a dismal Sacramento facility, concluded at a war-ruined hospital in former Yugoslavia. His uncompromising and singular vision of death pulls the skeletons out of the walls of the catacombs and puts them back together, pulls bodies off the coroner’s table, rips the bullets out of their bodies, sends them back to the barrel of the gun, reverses the muzzle flash, un-pulls the trigger, to find the exact moment violence begins. (“Death is ordinary. Behold it, subtract its patterns and lessons from those of the death that weapons bring, and maybe the residue will show what violence is.”) His focus moves to the gun itself, as he examines the aesthetics and morality of weapons. Behind the sights, clutching the weapon, stands the user: he is the lonely atom, whose existence and rights must be defined and qualified. What means and ends are legitimately available to the individual? And how does the lovely atom protect the woman he loves when she is alone in the dark and crawling night of a park in Sacramento? Never mind his obligations to submit to authority; the lonely atom, the writer, sits at the kitchen table while he cleans and loads his gun.
I would define the next sections as the theoretical component of this work, including volumes II, III, and IV. These comprise of a deeply referential and sometimes discursive examination of the justifications which moral actors, alone or in groups, may use to legitimize or explain their violence. Defense of Honor, for instance, gives is Joan of Arc burning at the stake and Mao’s doctor caught in a bind between loyalty and dishonor. Is legitimate authority justified in putting them to death or under pressure of losing their life for the ideals of honor. And what of Defense or Class, making ants of humans, placing us in a multi-tiered nest layered like a cake, a cake baked with flour made from the wheat stolen by Lenin and Stalin from the kulaks, who surely deserved to die for their crimes against class, which was to say owning two cattle… didn’t they, comrade? Defense of Authority remains in the USSR, comparing and contrasting Trotsky’s dirty razor of loyalty with Lincoln’s domination of the Confederate rebellion; ice axe, bullet, it’s all the same: isn’t it interesting that both had the back of their skulls cracked open by metal in the end? And what of the heart of the Civil War, John Brown and the Harper’s Ferry uprising? What can we mere mortals glean from the clash of the god-emperors at Tenochtitlán? Defense of War Aims brings us to the hamlets of Mỹ Lai 4 and Mỹ Khe 4; Defense of Homeland, to the front line between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. Defense of the Earth and Animals recalls in equal measure John Muir and the old man in greyish kamiks, tree-spiking ecoterrorists in the Pacific Northwest and the bludgeoning of seals by an Inuk rifleman. Defense of Gender invokes the voiceless and invisible Afghani women begging by the side of the road and Danny Rolling as a disturbed Achilles with a craven thirst for power over others. Defense against Traitors asks the Viet Cong why their shining ideal required the beheading a young mother; Defense of the Revolution asks Robespierre why his required the same a thousand times over. Moral actors are also asked to defend their instincts: Pancho Villa’s deterrence, Lawrence of Arabia’s retribution, Odysseus’s revenge. The FBI of Ruby Ridge and Waco get their say; how would they feel knowing that giggling De Sade’s word is as good as theirs? And so the theoretical half of Rising Up and Rising Down ends with the fate of the victims: the sick and dying withering away in sanctioned hospitals, victims of land mines which exploded three decades after the treaties were signed, and child soldiers who are forced to fight and must pay the bailiff’s toll all the same. Above all else we must remember the victim.
Following theory is what I’ll call the praxis sections of the novel, divided up by region rather than chronology, depicting Vollmann’s career as a conflict journalist throughout the 90’s and early 2000’s. In Southeast Asia, he goes with Vanna to see the skulls on the shelves of the Khmer Rouge torture sites, bribes generals to find out if Pol Pot is alive, and then returns to America, where the impoverished children of Cambodian refugees have settled in Los Angeles’s worst neighborhoods. Every day they are victimized by other youth gangs, and by each other. They are the last generation. In Thailand, rogue journalist Ken Miller helps him steal a young girl from a brothel and smuggle her into a school for rescue and rehabilitation. In Burma he crosses borders and opium poppy fields to interview Khun Sa, the Opium King, target of thirty attempted assassinations by our government. In Africa, visiting Madagascar and the Democratic Republic of Congo, he enters a world of constant class conflict where no one is safe from robbing and extortion on the street. The Muslim World takes him from a requisitioned stadium in Somalia filled with American Marines and personnel carriers to Malaysia, where the PULO’s bombs are kept quiet by the government, a symbolic terror group denied symbolism and aesthetic recognition, led by the calm and collected and mercurial Old Man. In Iraq, our sanctions starve, and every interview is tense and taut; Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, meanwhile, receives him warmly, with their hands on their hearts. In North America, he explores Apache Reservations struck by an epidemic of contagious suicide, interviews and shoots with Ted Nugent, and becomes incensed at the sight of media vultures and political activists and Scientologists all advertising themselves at Columbine. In Jamaica, neighborhoods clash with neighborhoods in a roving cycle of betrayal and justification, while he must stand by. In South America, Colombia’s guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries confuse and exhaust him, and steal his father’s old watch. Vollmann’s darkest exploration of praxis is in Europe, where he documents the civil wars of former Yugoslavia. He travels with the radical Vineta, has his life threatened by Serbian militants holding a bayonet to his throat, and crosses the melted-steel bridges in the burned-out cities. In Sarajevo he finds himself trapped in a tower of dorm apartments, under siege every night by snipers across the road, with supplies dwindling. The path of the Balkans leads him inexorably to Mostar, where his two friends and he take a fatal detour. A sniper takes their lives and spares his, or else a land mine, or perhaps both, and he’s trembling with shock in the backseat and then he’s talking to the irregulars who storm to up to the car and later he’s wandering around the United Nations hospital sucking the juice from the oranges that were in the trunk of the car. (This is certainly the origin of the occasional motif of oranges scattered throughout the work.) The gauntlet of Yugoslavia informs further work, sections of The Atlas and Last Stories and Other Stories, which I count among the very best of his entire career. Told journalistically through his eyes it clarifies much about his stories and obfuscates yet more. In this regard it is perfect.
The final section of the praxis-based journalism is, I think, neglected by most reviewers who praise this work. I’d prefer to call it the predictions, as the final three case studies (labeled as “Perception and Irrationality”) seem to prefigure the future. In Japan, the “thick-blooded” underclass is placed in a position of racial impurity solely based on the area in which they were born; this merging of class and race may predict the future of marginalization. He goes off the grid and interviews Bo Gritz, major property developer and populist presidential candidate beloved by the right, prefiguring the rise of Donald Trump. Gritz, over the course of his hundred-page interview, subtly twists the book into a postmodern mystery story: like Vollmann, he claims to have interviewed Khun Sa. The connections of his intelligence career links the American right and gun culture from the North American sections to the global patterns in revolution and police action. How much of Vollmann’s journey was influenced by intelligence agencies, who invisibly profiled him as a potential terrorist (Notoriously, they thought he was the Unabomber - but if you’ve made it this far you probably already knew that.) and does that change or even strengthen the ethos of his life’s work? I certainly think it does. The monumental work ends with Vollmann’s attempt to understand the magic and mystery of New Orleans voodoo and Santería; ghosts and spirits are among the residue death leaves behind, giving a phantasmagorical quality to what we trace in the chalk outlines of means and ends. We discover new ways to kill; war is just a shot away. We discover new reasons to kill; our nations grind their teeth and salivate at the thought of destroying each other. We all have our futures and our fates; we are moral actors, haunted by what came before, but we are not powerless: we all have a choice to make.
Perhaps most affectingly, this work is also a sort of memoir; each profile of a historical moral actor is also a rumination on the writer’s own choices and future. He wrote it as a guidebook for the next generations to more wisely analyze the choices they make. I am a member of the first generation to grow up alongside it. (The book is older than me, but not by much.) As every father, he wanted to make a better world for his daughter. Why did he have to lose her?
But no matter. History shambles on. In the blue-black heart of distant smoldering battlefields and the smooth white marble edifices of our government, in abandoned inner cities and pleasant suburban homes, we are condemned to contradiction: history will make turncoats of us all, as we are concurrently doves reaching for the heavens and hammers smashing into the ground, the duration of our fleeting lives spent rising up and rising down.
February 5, 2025
i read an article a couple of years ago about a study which had found the qualities which tended to make a person successful in business/finance (e.g. a willingness to act quickly without belabouring thought and take risks on a moment's notice) were also those which made a person more likely to fall for scams which a more cautious person would see through, so ironically those with most to lose were more likely to lose it (further proof financial prosperity does not equate to intelligence or having truly earned it).
in the same way some of those very qualities which make vollmann a great writer and admirable human (an open-mindedness, willingness to hear out any side which makes him able to articulate a wide range of human thought and feeling) show him up especially nakedly here as a poor thinker, coming out as a willful naivete which makes him say some very silly things and make some false equivalences.
in the same way some of those very qualities which make vollmann a great writer and admirable human (an open-mindedness, willingness to hear out any side which makes him able to articulate a wide range of human thought and feeling) show him up especially nakedly here as a poor thinker, coming out as a willful naivete which makes him say some very silly things and make some false equivalences.
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June 18, 2024Like I said, I will have a full review once I've gotten through all 7 volumes of RURD. I will say- I was at times incredibly frustrated with the arguments Vollmann is making when discussing defense of class and to a lesser extent race, and take issue with his focus and resources used. That said, it helps me to define my own position on the matter, so overall the book is working as he intended. The case study comparing Lincoln with Trotsky is a highlight of this volume for me.
November 28, 2024
This one took me a while to get through, but it is lovingly researched and well-written.
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