Brain Pain discussion

This thread is for posting questions and links to resources for William Vollmann’s The Ice-Shirt, volume one of his series, Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes.


Wikipedia link for William Vollmann

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_...


Wikipedia link for The Ice-Shirt

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ice-...


Feel free to use this thread to ask questions and post links to resources for William Vollmann’s The Ice-Shirt.

Also, if you’ve written a review of the book, please post a link to share with the group.

A radio interview from 1991, discussing The Ice-Shirt

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWIPj...

Yayyy! My book just arrived today. It sounds like it will be a lot of fun.

Getting a head start this weekend. From the preface:

"Readers are warned that the sketch-maps and boundaries here are provisional, approximate, unreliable and wrong. Nonetheless, I have furnished them, for as my text is no more than a pack of lies they can do no harm."

Jt wrote: "Getting a head start this weekend. From the preface:

"Readers are warned that the sketch-maps and boundaries here are provisional, approximate, unreliable and wrong. Nonetheless, I have furnished ..."

If only politicians were this candid...

I also started The Ice-Shirt this weekend. I see why there was some early discussion of the supernatural in the Sagas.

I'm going to have to learn to take better notes while reading. I'm 165 pages into the Ice-Shirt and I'm not sure what I'll be bringing to the discussion next week.

So, here I'm jealous on two counts: 1) y'all are reading The Ice-Shirt, my first Vollmann and the one which struck conviction into my heart that he is the Greatest Living Author of His Generation. 2) That some of you have read The Sagas of the Icelanders or parts thereof.

Two erratic comments. It is my thesis that the saga literature plays a central role in Vollmann's literary style (also, the surrealists such as Comte de Lautréamont). If I recall correctly, it was major reading for him in his student days and I think it is the source for some of his ability to avoid problems of irony which were central to the DFW-overcoming-postmodernism problem. WTV simply went back to stuff that is not a (psychological) novel writing. Vollmann, especially with The Ice-Shirt, is placing himself between the genres of epic/saga and novel, just as other of his works place him between fiction and journalism. For this particular question, I'd recommend Bakhtin's essay "Epic and Novel" from his The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (it's short and relatively approachable). One tidbit I keep in mind from this Bakhtin essay is the contrast in characterization between epic/saga and novel; in epic/saga the whole character is present at all times (think of Achilles), viewed always and only from an exterior, and does not develop, whereas in novels a character will change and develop, 'grow up', and will have an interiority. I suspect that WTV liked the manner of characterization found in epic/saga because it represents a certain non-invasive relationship to the characters, respecting their private experience as private and not to be trespassed upon (which shows up as an important element in his whore writings).

Second note is to follow up on the conversation Stephen P and I were having in the thread under my Fathers and Crows review. There we were trying to identify a genre of novel we are calling 'voice-oriented literature.' And since that conversation has fermented a bit in my mind, I suspect a good characterization or criteria for identifying this kind of writing would be that they draw upon an already existing literature (the sagas, the Jesuit Relations, etc) which already speaks, and a novel written through and with these voices would allow them to speak as themselves and not to be trampled upon by an author writing "his" story the way "he" wants to write it, but rather that such an author is in a position merely to receive dictation from the source material, if I may use that metaphor. I suspect too that something like Gaddis's A Frolic of His Own (I've not read it yet) would be doing something similar insofar as Gaddis there is writing in the language of The Law and speaks only in such a manner as the voice of the law demands it be spoken. Frankly, Stephen and I have not yet found too many instances of this voice-oriented literature aside from WTV's own.

[still jealous] Please please, good BPeople, do not fail to link your reviews here for us all to link to and Like.

[I do put on my Happy Shirt whenever a Reader puts on the Vollmann Shirt]

Nathan "N.R." wrote: "So, here I'm jealous on two counts: 1) y'all are reading The Ice-Shirt, my first Vollmann and the one which struck conviction into my heart that he is the Greatest Living Author of His Generation...."

My happy-shirt is on N.R. and I am thankful for your continued thinking on this. I was just mentioning our conversation to Proustitute yesterday and here you brought it to fruition. This is precisely it. The same holds true for the Royal Family where he lived-dangerously again-for years with this subculture and "they" spoke to and through him. Thank for closing the circle on this. Finally, I will be able to sleep better. But if we were to find an authorial voice without the history of a people behind it then....

Stephen wrote: "But if we were to find an authorial voice without the history of a people behind it then.... "

Is William the Blind's role to be the Janus-faced listener/teller? Is he to represent the nexus between history qua it-really-happened and fiction qua story-as-story, the imaginative gap-filling which is the role of the fictional half of historical fiction? Perhaps it's this knowledge of being in a position to fail his responsibility to each side that causes the remarks about this all being a "lie" etc. WTV intends for his Dreams to be usable in a classroom setting, which is the purpose of all of the apparatus matter, back material, etc, that his fictioning of history will be at least transparent [ie, "I checked with the experts and they told me 'not likely' but my story needed it and so I left it in. Make of THAT what you will."] Is William the Blind also the fictioning of the author just as the author is fictionizing history? WTV would like to tell you these untold stories but does not want to stand in your (dear Reader's) way as an authority on the subject, that you (dear Reader) will have (also) an independent experience of the story, distanced from an author too in control of the question of what counts as true.

There is one sentence (or actually part of a sentence) in The Ice-Shirt which, hidden as it is in the middle of a longer sentence in the middle of a long paragraph, seemed quite central to me for the role of the narrator / author in The Ice-Shirt (and presumably in Vollmann's oeuvre in general): (quoted from memory as of course I forgot to mark it) "what we see depends on who shows it to us". Or possibly "... on the way it is shown to us." I really wish I had marked that bit. :/

Nathan "N.R." wrote: "Stephen wrote: "But if we were to find an authorial voice without the history of a people behind it then.... "

Is William the Blind's role to be the Janus-faced listener/teller? Is he to represen..."

As typical N.R. your probing thinking and writing has left me in the quandary of trying to discover and organize my own thoughts. It may be awhile until this comes to fruition but I don't want to put you off any longer. I believe that William The Blind is Vollmann's nexus between fiction and history as well as Vollmann's substitute so as to maintain the work in appearance as a History without gaps. His comment about the work being a, "Lie," seems to be a comment on this; the postulation that History is in an essence a form of Fiction, the boundary line quavering within one of the modes of Bhaktin analysis.

Thank you for the Bahktin link. It is still beyond my reach so I will use your explanation from your comment above but will continue to reread your excellent review of the book as well as buy it. Understand it fully or not I know that Bahktin boils down to an essence of writing and reading that I must understand, no matter how much work and time it takes.

However I am not a fan of recorded-history. I find facts and dates flat and uninteresting even while knowing they are important to our culture. What I am fascinated by is Bahktin's, fictional novel, which is steeped in the interiority and psychological developments of its characters. A personal preference of mine, idiosyncratic and not reflecting on either's value. Thus, Ice-Shirt was not my kind-of book. I found my interest wandering then vanishing-which in an upside down way probably proves Vollmann's success if he was set on producing a work with the appearance and feel of a History.

I experienced it as vastly different from the, Royal Family. In TRF Vollmann seemed more willing to reveal his characters and himself. While possibly not a Bahktin psychological work of fiction-novel TRF was a more closely narrated work than, The Ice-Shirt. In TRF I experienced Vollmann discovering, becoming more excited, developing himself as a person, a writer, (a concept I heard from my son-in-law, which I told you about in a previous communication, so I won't take any credit if there is any to be had,) as the work progresses.

As you aptly put it this was not his intent in writing Ice-Shirt. Since I did not fall-into, I-S, I did not experience the power of his listened to, and arrived voice as I did with TRF. Since you were immersed in both was his voice as powerful in I-S, the same experience of, voice-oriented-literature?

Larou wrote: "There is one sentence (or actually part of a sentence) in The Ice-Shirt which, hidden as it is in the middle of a longer sentence in the middle of a long paragraph, seemed quite central to me for the role of the narrator / author in The Ice-Shirt (and presumably in Vollmann's oeuvre in general): (quoted from memory as of course I forgot to mark it) "what we see depends on who shows it to us". Or possibly "... on the way it is shown to us." I really wish I had marked that bit. :/ ..."

Found the line you quoted, page 248:

Thus it seemed to Freydis as if she had acquired Blueness in Wineland just as in east Greenland she had struck upon the rock and called the name of AMORTORTAK. She needed the Skrælings precisely because she despised them: being trolls, they knew what she must know. Just as each country's sky is its own shade of blue (and just as what you see depends on who shows it to you), so one must put on the same shirt over and over in different climates: - that was how it seemed to her; therefore that is how it was.

Jim wrote: "Found the line you quoted, "

Oooh, thank you very much!

I think that line explains a lot about why Vollmann-the-Author is so present in The Ice-Shirt - he is showing us exactly who is showing us what we see. It's not, in the classical modernist sense, a filtering of things and events through a consciousness but the gesture of presenting itself already affects what is being presented, and that is something Vollmann is very conscious of (and that he makes the reader aware of). If I was inclined towards scientific metaphors I'd feel very tempted to call that a quantum approach to writing...

Took absurdly long and does not really contain anything I haven't already said during the group discussion, but if anyone still wants to take a look at it, my post on The Ice-Shirt is here.

Larou wrote: "Took absurdly long and does not really contain anything I haven't already said during the group discussion, but if anyone still wants to take a look at it, my post on The Ice-Shirt is here."

Well written review! You articulated the complexity of the work without making it seem intimidating. Thanks for sharing.

Larou wrote: "Took absurdly long and does not really contain anything I haven't already said during the group discussion, but if anyone still wants to take a look at it, my post on The Ice-Shirt is here."

Loved your review. Articulate, easy to follow and completely absorbing. Thank you. Your review was not only illuminating, it was fun to read as well. I'm going back to the book as soon as I finish posting this!