Michael Wood on William T. Volume

Michael Wood has a nice article on William T. Vollman in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books. Most of it concerns the latest National Book Award winner, Europe Central, a book I started but just couldn't finish. I'll try again when I'm unemployed again. I enjoyed, really enjoyed, The Rainbow Stories (especially the Green Dress), which I read a few years back, and Europe Central is the same sort of sprawling, 1,000 page epic we've come to expect from him every few months.

From the beginning of his career Vollmann has understood that distortions of the real can improve rather than hinder our vision. His first novel, You Bright and Risen Angels (1987), was subtitled "A Cartoon," and had an epigraph from a manual on graphic art: "Only the expert will realize that your exaggerations are really true." Even the expert would have had a little trouble with this particular book, a hectic, allusive, and very funny account of the long war between a reactionary imperial power pictured as an electricity-mad America and the forces of rebellion represented by a seething mass of insects and their human allies. The exaggerations—the portraits of capitalists as rapaciousness personified, of revolutionaries as children who never got over the horrors of summer camp—are not meant to be "really true," but they do hint at forms of continuity that are important to Vollmann. A hyperbole, he is saying, is the rhetorical end of a line which may start out in modest-looking fact. Or more polemically, "nothing displays such an artificial nature as 'life as we know it.'"

Elsewhere in the article (and in Rising Up and Rising Down, his multi-volume epic study on the morality of violence), Vollman writes the following:

"I take my meaning where I can find it. When I can't find it, I invent it. And when I do that, I deny meaninglessness, and when I do that I am lying to myself."

I'm not sure that coheres very well, as it leads right back to the beginning of the quote, where he takes meaning where he can find it. Or maybe it's supposed to.