Search

As a consciously transgeneric text, William T. Vollmann’s Imperial explores the delineated realities of the US-Mexico border region by zeroing in geographically, culturally, histori- cally, even literarily via his own self-reflexive writing on the border county named Imperial. Vollmann’s intense focus on one specific area produces a sort of Pynchonian excess, melded with minimally precise “delineations,” that seeks a never quite settled ethical and aesthetic resolution of a reality where the border region is both literally divisive and ceaselessly po- rous. Such literal and literary ‘mapping’ articulates ambivalent strategies of material and textual wastefulness, it tracks toxic waste disposal and reckless waste abandonment, and it brings to light the conscious, exploitative wasting of human bodies and marginalized communities. But can a literary work of nonfiction invert the very wastefulness of waste through its own textual excesses? How does one confront an empire of waste through the very strategies of wastefulness? Un texto conscientemente trans-genérico, Imperial de William T. Vollmann traza las realidades delineadas de la región fronteriza entre los EE.UU. y México, centrándose en el condado de Imperial. Lo hace tanto geográfica como cultural, histórica y también literariamente a través de su escritura autorreflexiva, elaborando una especie de exceso pynchoniano en la que convergen sus ‘delineaciones’ a la busca de una resolución ética y estética de una realidad cuya frontera es literalmente una divisoria y, a la vez, transgredida incesantemente. Su cartografía literal y literaria se fundamenta en estrategias ambivalentes de desperdicio material y textual; su texto persigue la gestión e irresponsable abandono de desechos tóxicos; pero también esclarece el intencionado y explotador desgaste de cuerpos humanos y comunidades marginales. ¿Puede una obra literaria de no-ficción, como es el caso, invertir el proceso de desperdicio de lo residual por medio de su textualidad excesiva y desperdiciadora? ¿Cómo se enfrenta uno a un imperio de deshechos, el deshecho de lo imperial, a través de las mismas estrategias de desperdicio?

Presentazione della sezione “«We Should Never Write Without Feelings». Studi su William T. Vollmann”. Introduction to the monographic section “’We Should Never Write Without Feelings.’ Studies on William T. Vollmann”., ENTHYMEMA, No 23 (2019)

This article proposes environmental memory as an approach to reframing environmental justice in transnational contexts through the work of U.S. author, William T. Vollmann. Combining recent theorizations of environmental memory with Nancy Fraser’s “politics of framing,” I argue that Vollmann reimagines the political spaces of social ecology in the twenty-first century by metafictionally dramatizing the various contexts, uses, limits, and possibilities of narrative. I focus on two novels, The Ice-Shirt (1990) and Imperial (2009), to illustrate how Vollmann constructs environmental memory as a challenge to the interpretive frame of the nation-state in an era of anthropogenic change. As with other contributions to this issue, the original occasion of this essay was for a publication following the 2014 symposium, “Rethinking Environmental Consciousness,” at Mid Sweden University. Since then, the intensification of borders and reactionary nationalisms under neoliberalism have made the reimagining of transnational connections even more urgent. As this reading contends, Vollmann’s profuse narratives do not begin to exhaust the possibilities of rewriting that history. Rather, they suggest a modest starting point.

William T. Vollmann frequently asserts that his ideal reader will appreciate the functionality and beauty of his sentences. This article begins by taking such claims seriously, and draws on both literary and rhetorical stylistics to explore some of the many ways that his texts answer to his intention to find “the right sentence for the right job.” In particular, this article argues that Vollmann’s stylistic decisions are most notable when they most directly satisfy his effort to produce texts that foster empathetic knowledge, serve truth, resist abusive power, and encourage charitable action. Extended close analyses of passages from an early and from a mid-career text (The Rainbow Storiesand Europe Central) illustrate Vollmann’s consistency across two decades of his career regarding choices in the areas of figuration (including schemes and tropes of comparison, repetition, balance, naming, and amplification), grammar, deixis, allusion, and other compositional strategies. Particular attention is paid to passages that display the stylistic mechanisms underlying Vollmann’s negotiation of his texts’ moral qualities, including both the moral content of the worlds represented in the texts, and the moral responsibility the texts bear with regard to their audience. The results of my analyses demonstrate that Vollmann typically prioritizes openness, critique, and dialogue not only in terms of incident and character, but also on the scale of the phrase, clause, and sentence. Ultimately, this article shows how Vollmann’s sentences serve his declared intentions and allow readers to recognize compatibilities between Vollmann’s works and the characteristic features of post-postmodernist writing in general., ENTHYMEMA, No 23 (2019)

The article compares the representation of Asian sex workers in William T. Vollmann’s Butterfly Stories(1993) and Michel Houellebecq’s Platform(Plateforme, 2001). Both the novels are set in South-East Asia, and both involve an apologetic and romanticised description of the sex trade. By comparing the two novels, I argue that both authors’ treatments of the sex industry develop a critique of Western Orientalism, and at the same time sympathy for and complicity with the colonial power dynamics that regulate the relationships between Asian countries and the West., ENTHYMEMA, No 23 (2019)

A shorter version of this interview was published in The Claw, Fall 2009, Vol 2, No 1. © by Max McClure. Reprinted by permission., ENTHYMEMA, No 23 (2019)

Per testimoniare la diffusione e la fortuna di Vollmann in Italia, Massimo Bocchiola, traduttore di Fathers and Crows(1992; Venga il tuo regno, 2011), Luca Briasco, editor di Minimum Fax, Claudia Durastanti, scrittrice, e Vanni Santoni, scrittore ed editor, intervengono con un loro personale contributo da lettori di Vollmann. In order to discuss Vollmann’s reception in Italy, Massimo Bocchiola, translator of Fathers and Crows (1992; Venga il tuo regno, 2011), Luca Briasco, editor at Minimum Fax, Claudia Durastanti, writer, and Vanni Santoni, writer and editor, participate with their personal point of view as Vollmann’s readers., ENTHYMEMA, No 23 (2019)

The aim of the article is to ponder, from a narratological perspective, on the fictional pacts in William T. Vollmann’s Seven Dreamsseries, i.e., on the virtual contract through which the author gives the reader, whether explicitly or not, instructions about the way in which his texts should be read, and that the reader, in turn, should follow to coherently process textual contents. By focusing on The Ice-Shirt, the first novel in the series, I will try to demonstrate how such a pact proves to be a problematic one, especially in that, throughout the whole text, fictional and non-fictional elements are constantly blended. Moreover, my aim is to address how on the reader’s part a ‘flexible’ approach, i.e., an approach that recognizes and builds on such a compresence of elements, allows him to navigate a text that reveals to be hybrid in nature., ENTHYMEMA, No 23 (2019)

Le roman La Famille royale de William T. Vollmann depeint les villes de la Cote ouest des Etats-Unis en une epopee dantesque, une descente aux enfers a la recherche du salut dans la decheance. Chaque ville represente une philosophie, une structure de l’espace mental dans l’espace urbain. Le roman elabore une dialectique conflictuelle entre San Francisco et Sacramento pour l’essentiel, mises en regard de Los Angeles et de Las Vegas plus brievement. Au bout de son periple urbain, la quete metaphysique du heros dechu s’acheve a Slab City, une utopie dont le denuement et l’âpre poesie restent ouverts a tous les possibles.

At first sight Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco’s Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt belongs solidly in the same tradition as books such as James Agee and Walker Evans’s classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), which grew out of an assignment in 1936 to produce a magazine article on the conditions sharecropper families in the South lived under during the “Dust Bowl,” as well as William T. Vollmann’s 2007 book Poor People.Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt describes the predicament of the rapidly growing underclass in the States, victims of corporate capitalism in what Hedges refers to as “sacrifice zones,” areas that have been offered up for exploitation in the name of profit. The reader is introduced to despaired people living on the Pine Ridge Lakota reservation in South Dakota; the homeless of Camden, N.J.; migrant workers assigned to pick tomatoes in worker camps in Florida; and individuals suffering from and resisting mountain-top removal by coal companies in West Virginia. However, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt departs from this tradition of social reportage in several significant ways, and my article will address how—with a particular focus on the book’s use of drawingsand comics reportage in the place of photography. What are the implications of this particular verbal-visual strategy? Interrogating the ethics of the drawn documentary image inevitably implies addressing its peculiar, somewhat paradoxical authenticity, and to think of how drawings differ from photographs in how they depict the world. In my discussion of this I’ll draw on both documentary and comics theory (Paul Ward, Hillary Chute, Charles Hatfield). I will argue that the use of drawn images in Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt results in a new form of what W.J.T. Mitchell calls “imagetext,” one that raises its fundamental social and political questions with energy, passion, and ethical integrity.