Rising Up And Rising Down

William Vollmann shuffled into the dimly-lit reading room off the basement coffee bar at Elliott Bay Books around quarter after seven. A small, soft man, with strange, roughly chopped hair and eyes that point in slightly different directions. He read two chapters from his new novel, Europe Central, then took questions.

Hearing him describe An Afghanistan Picture Show as his most memorable failure did not exactly fill me, who had only brought that title, long a favorite, to the signing, with anything resembling confidence, but I wandered up afterward anyway, for a signature, drawing, and conversation.

I don't think Vollmann is a particularly great fiction writer, but I have read almost all of his nonfiction, some pieces repeatedly -- the Survival Research Labs chapter of the Rainbow Stories; much of The Atlas -- and having had a chance to talk to him I think I now understand why that writing means so much to me. Whereas the fiction is baroque and expressionistic, the nonfiction is, comparatively speaking, very plain, with Vollmann's subjects doing most of the talking, and his authorial interjections focusing on, in turn, the speaking subject, or things in the subject's immediate environment that support or reinforce what the subject is saying.

In other words, a reportorial technique that amounts to the minimization of self, and the integrity, when self does appear, to subject it to the same relentless scrutiny that he, in turn, subjects others to.

Vollmann asked me, and every other person in the signing line-up, detailed, probing questions about our signing choices. His uneven eyes watching carefully as I (& others) spoke. I have no doubt that if he were to recall, days or weeks after the fact, the signing, he would remember not only whole chunks of dialogue, but other, more telling details, too.
- posted by cjb @ 8:53 PM