Before we go there, let's accept as a common truth the fact that for writers and students of writing, the importance of the sentence as a unit of linguistic meaning can not be understated. It is, linguistically speaking, where the magic happens. Words (at least, in the English language; I'm no polyglot, and have no idea how things work in, say, Shqip, or Occitan) are fabulous things, but without a platform upon which they can be set in order, nothing comes of them. And a marvelous platform it is, capable of containing multiple permutations and combinations of various sets of words, allowing for the creation of entirely new forms of communicative meaning and artistic beauty. Durable, too, is the sentence; it remains true to itself through the abuses of instant messaging and advertising. As a culture, we adore the sentence more than we might recognize. Upon a single opening sentence can the entire value and worth of a novel or an article lie. Witness our fascination with the pithy quotation, the well-constructed, tersely cogent, self-sufficient bundle of words. Note the existence of the ellipsis; multiply the symbolic end of a sentence by three to indicate words left unsaid, a longing, a desire to encapsulate infinity and all meanings beyond the horizon.
A good sentence is a love letter to good writing.
Knowing then that sentences totally kick ass, it's only fair, in assessing the written work of William T. Vollmann, to examine his sentences, Vollmann being a man who has written, it must be said, quite a few of them. (Wikipedia lists 15 books in his bibliography, starting with 1987's You Bright and Risen Angels. One of those books--Rising Up and Rising Down--is seven volumes long. This guy spits out 4300 word blog posts in his sleep.)
My gut reaction to Vollmann's sentences? I feel that he does, sometimes, write excellent sentences, containing both truth and beauty. I also feel that he does, sometimes, write sentences that moonlight as orphan stranglers. If you're going to read or really study Vollmann, then, it's only fair to ask and consider how the two extremes influence our perception of themselves. Are his highs that high and lows that low on their own? Or does the contrast between the two cast them into sharper relief than they'd attain independently?
The Rainbow Stories offers an excellent example of this contrast in the neighboring sentences which open "The Boundaries of the Catherine-Horizon," the fourth section of the "Violet Hair" story. Observe the first sentence:
It is known that holiness is localized.
This is a beautiful sentence. It has a recognizable subject ("It") and predicate (the rest). The organization is clean, the rhythm is propulsive, and the meaning, the idea, is readily obvious yet illuminatingly complex. No word here is superfluous. There is a harmonious synthesis of the words written and those left unsaid.
To say more would be to overstate the case. Consider, then, the sentence which follows this one. (My apologies for any errors in my transcription.)
Thus, a weaker ectoplasmic field is reported to exist on automated ranches, whose green alfalfa-beds are enlightened only by the random rainbow dews of sprinklers, than in desert ghost towns where tall thin phantoms hoot in chimneys like apes of justice, laboriously attempting to imitate their mentors and masters, the summer owls of whom I have already spoken, and although they scarcely possess the resonance of flesh, which would be of value to them in achieving their dark-livered endeavors (actually they do not have livers either), their reedy efforts are indulgently applauded by the owls in feathery wing-beats; thus encouraged, fat ghosts now roll tumbleweeds back and forth on Main Street with translucent smiles of vacuous delight; if the owls are amused then they will clap their claws together in mid-air with the savage elegance of clashing antlers, in the process, perhaps, letting slip some squeaking dying rodent-ball whose bloody dews the ghosts can inhale, but since this happens no more than every hundred years, if at all, it is fortunate for these freeze-dried souls that they have no tibial collateral ligaments to shrink or spasm, and can therefore flex their shimmering knees all night in the pursuit of their summer sport, vainly hoping to incite the owls' beaked praise.
That sentence is bullshit. I'm thinking Julianne Moore in Boogie Nights: "This is the worst sentence I have ever seen." I'm thinking this sentence murders babies. This sentence voted for the terrorists. This sentence places mustard gas inside the souls of saints. It's the self-important garbage poured into the bluebook five minutes before the bell ends the exam period. This sentence is Battlefield Earth re-enacted by John Travolta's mucus-drenched nosehairs. This sentence is Metal Machine Music sung by a grade school bully sinking into a vat of boiling acid. It's verbal poison.
It's awful.
Beauty? It flirts with the concept yet falls flat long before its end. Taken on a chunk-by-chunk measure, there is some rhythm or momentary flow to some of the individual phrases and clauses within the sentence. Unfortunately, these bits and pieces don't play nice together. They neither connect nor cohere, and are often antagonistic to each other. Every single time I reach the bit about "the summer owls of whom I have already spoken," my brain steps out for a cup of coffee and a bagel while the sentence clamors forward, oblivious. Then there's the livers-not-livers bit. Vollmann here wrote two phrases that negate each other. It's like there's literally nothing on the page but black ink in the deceitful shape of meaning.
Meaning? There is none. This sentence is devoid of meaning. It neither stands on its own nor fulfills or expands on the promise and premise of the sentence that preceded it. Lest it seem like I haven't tried, note that I read, or attempted to read, this sentence at least ten times when I first encountered it in the book. That's approximately seven to eight more times than most literary sentences deserve. Furthermore, I went the extra step of typing it out--copying another writer's work being one of those techniques you'll sometimes hear as being a worthwhile method of aiding yourself in getting the language inside your brain, of getting yourself deeply embedded in the work's rhythm and flow and ideas. Every moment that I typed and I began to think something clear was bubbling its way up out of the muck and mire was followed almost immediately by a sinking gasp as the air rushed back away and I lost all sight of the surface.
This sentence, it's like drowning. What's worse is that it left me violently antagonistic toward everything that followed it. I read the rest of the story, but I took little pleasure in it, and I received little information or meaning from it. Which is a shame because it was a story about a girl with purple hair who reads philosophy. That's really hot. Or, at least, it should have been really hot.
It's hard to segue out of this little pool of bile and vitriol I've poured onto this sentence, so let's just jump to a disclaimer and a point. The disclaimer is this: it might be pointed out that I'm being unfair or too harsh in my assessment of a single sentence out of a man's lengthy oeuvre, especially considering the sentence is found in that man's second book, a book which, in retrospect, might be seen as a transitional or experimental book, one in which we can still see the mind of the writer struggling to find his path or his voice. That's a valid criticism but I'll note that it's worth remembering that in this life we are defined by the choices we make and that in writing, whether good or bad, every single word is a choice. While I can't immediately recall such awful sentences from Europe Central, and so while it might be tempting to say that Vollmann has since purged such overblown excesses (to put it mildly) from his work, I'm not sure it's worth giving the guy a pass just yet. Maybe readers with a more detailed and broad grasp of his work can argue one way or the other about this subject. I shall choose to remain critical.
And, as for my point...er, hey, hold on. That's right. I do actually recall some awful sentences from Europe Central. How about just about every god-forsaken sentence in the book's opening paragraph? If not most of the sentences from the first thirty-plus pages of the book? My word, I recall them now. How on earth did I get past them? How did I go on to finish that book, and then read another book, and then read a book after that? Dear heaven, what is wrong with me? To be fair, there were plenty of damn good sentences in Europe Central. My copy of the book is riddled with underlines and jotted-out page references. Maybe someday I'll dig my copy out from the bottom of the 2006 Towering Pile Of Nonsense and type some up. For now, trust me when I promise that, the beef, it is in there.
But now, really, for my point, my conclusion: Vollmann is not a genius. Neither is he terrible. His sentences can swing radically in either direction. In my recent Pynchon post, I took a pot shot at Vollmann as offering linguistic rather than structural difficulty. (Or at least just plain linguistic, I don't think I made any pronouncements about structural.) Maybe this post offers some idea of what exactly I and other bloggers and commentators mean when we say this guy's writing can be overblown: it can, at times, offer difficulty devoid of reward.
For me, a reader who is dealing with the question of where I stand on Vollmann's work--a question that every reader, I think, has to face when reading his stuff--this means I wind up strongly ambivalent. I'm intrigued enough that I'll continue to read his work; I'm also far more willing and ready to discount anything that feels like claptrap. For you, who are trying to decide whether to follow the hype and read Vollmann's stuff, what this means is you need to ask yourself whether you are patient enough to dig through the garbage to find the good stuff. Are you ready to play along with the editors at home?
And for you other readers of Vollmann, all this gives you an additional chance to decide for yourself whether I'm a decent person. (Hint: I am. Honest.)
1 comment:
Well said. Vollmann needs an editor prepared to point a gun at something he is deeply attached to.
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