Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means
by William T. Vollmann (Ecco) $29.95

Five or so years ago, the difficult novelist and established journalist William T. Vollmann was diagnosed by a New York Times critic as suffering from an acute case of logorrhea. However, this was not an accurate identification of Vollmann's problem. Logorrhea implies an unstoppable and often violent vomiting of spoken words, and so it's more likely to afflict a slam poet than a professional writer. Vollmann's condition is better described as graphomania--meaning something (a vacuum, a wolfish hunger) in his soul forces him to write far more than he needs to. Indeed, since his career began in the mid- '80s, Vollmann has written so much that he now suffers from chronic pain in his wrists. He can't hold a coffee cup or a bottle of beer without hurting the joint that connects his ulna to his hand.

Last year, Vollmann published a seven-volume, 3,300-page book called Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means. McSweeney's was the eccentric publisher of this eccentric work, an attempt to examine the entire history of human violence. Our age has no better example of acute graphomania than Rising Up and Rising Down. In a previous age--the 20th century--the best short story about this condition was undoubtedly Abram Tertz's "Graphomaniacs," which can be found in his collection Fantastic Stories.

Set in the restricted world of Soviet Union publishing, "Graphomaniacs" is about a group of writers who are committed to their disease, their compulsion to write endlessly. In this story Galkin, the king poet of the graphomaniacs and enemy of the story's narrator, describes the graphomaniacs' work as the "foundation of foundations and the beginning of beginnings... [It is] the swampy soil from which the springs of poetry draw their origins. This soil is saturated with moisture... [And] a time will come when it will burst out of the bowels of the earth and flood the world." Here, in this short passage, the best 20th-century short story about graphomania perfectly describes the manifestation of the worst known case of that disorder in the 21st century.

Because no one had the time to read Vollmann's swampy and bursting book, and because Vollmann is not indifferent to money, this year Ecco published an abridged version. The author hacked off three-fourths of the original text in his home office (or kitchen) in Sacramento, California. And yet, at the end of the messy business, not one square inch of the swamp was drained from the 700 pages that survived the edit. The experience of reading some books (André Gide's Pastoral Symphony, for example) is much like walking through a park; reading Rising Up and Rising Down is like wading through a quagmire of raw facts on violence and personal experiences with, and even dreams haunted by, violence. Everywhere you step there are quotes on violence by people who are still alive or have been dead for thousands of years.

Vollmann wanted to do the impossible: determine which acts of violence are wrong and which are right. To make this determination he studied, among many other models, the nonviolence advocated by Mahatma Gandhi (who doesn't fare very well in this book) and the ultra-violence advocated by Adolph Hitler (who also fares badly). Vollmann--who owns a gun and has used it, he writes, to ward off potential attacks while tracking down beloved whores in San Francisco's Tenderloin district-- vacillates continuously, swerving this way then that way, taking two steps forward then three steps back. "We need not set out to increase the number of justified homicides," he writes early in the book. "A more worthy end would be to decrease the need for them. But if homicides must be committed, better that they be justifiable."

In the way that the "The Grand Inquisitor" chapter is the lucid core of Dostoyevsky's otherwise maddening The Brothers Karamazov, the chapter "The Moral Calculus" is the lucid core of Vollmann's otherwise maddening book. At the opening of this chapter, the recklessly robust prose comes to a halt and suddenly there is an island of order--a clarity of categories and calculations. Here among the Borgesian taxonomies of human violence (lists, definitions, measurements, examples) is where you want to stay (and which you will revisit), but the chapter soon comes to end and you are back in the mud, back in the thick of things.

Vollmann reads and gives a talk at the University of Washington (Kane Hall, Room 120, 634-3400 for free tickets) on Thurs Dec 2 at 7:30 pm. By all urgent means, you should go.