Voluminous, very personal treatise on violence

By John Freeman
Special to The Seattle Times

	JEAN YVES LE ROY / AP The seven-volume "Rising Up and Rising Down" is organized thematically and begins in the Paris catacombs, which contain the bones of millions of people.
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For the past decade, it seemed Sacramento-based novelist William T. Vollmann was neck-and-neck in a war for who could write bigger, longer and more expansively, with Richard Powers, David Foster Wallace and anyone else who would take him on. With "Rising Up and Rising Down," he has put the issue to rest.

No American writer alive today is as crazy and as productive and as willing to risk his life as William T. Vollmann.

Drawing from nearly two decades of reporting (which Vollmann began after graduating from Cornell, when he went to Afghanistan to fight with the mujahedeen), "Rising Up and Rising Down" is best described as a moral calculus for violence. Using the conflicts of the past tumultuous decade, during which Americans shifted from the Cold War to the war on terror, it examines when violence is justifiable, and when it is not.

In many ways, Vollmann seems the perfect writer to tackle such a large subject. In his novels and nonfiction reporting, Vollmann has fired linguistic buckshot at the strange muchness of our global society, from the march of white settlers onto the North American continent (the "Seven Dreams" series) to the underbelly of prostitution in Southeast Asia ("The Atlas"). "Rising Up and Rising Down" employs that same literary strategy of "flooding the zone" to extrapolate a theory of human behavior as it relates to violence.

"Rising Up and Rising Down" by William T. Vollmann McSweeney's, $120 (seven volumes)

Like many of Vollmann's novels, the seven-volume (500 pages each) "Rising Up and Rising Down" has a Byzantine structure that works thematically as opposed to chronologically. The book begins in the Paris catacombs, where Vollmann immerses himself in the slimy inescapable fact of death. It concludes with an extended riff about discrimination against the Buraku people in Japan. The project's penultimate volume includes an actual moral calculus, a tool Vollmann offers to readers contemplating an actual act of violence. Each exercise with the calculus reveals the pointlessness of violence in the first place.

In addition to Vollmann's writing, which is precise and grittily poetic, "Rising Up and Rising Down" provides a meandering tour of hot spots across the globe, from Cambodia to Burma, Iraq to Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, Yugoslavia and Colombia, many of which Vollmann visited on journalistic assignment. The list of sources Vollmann cites in depth is simply dazzling, from Cicero to the King of Sparta.

Although he was no doubt paid well to make some of these trips, the cost for Vollmann was high. Crossing from Muslim to Serb-held territory in Croatia, one of his closest friends (who was acting as a translator) was shot and killed by a sniper. Vollmann had to wait beside him in their Jeep while he died. After a tense standoff, he then had to charm his friend's killers into letting him go free.

There are so many anecdotes in this book that one wonders, well, were they all necessary? Why not 350 pages, a book most people can read, rather than 3,500, a hunk of tree so large it took this reader five months in front of his keyboard (the book was sent out in advance as a CD-ROM) to complete? My eyeballs are still watering.

The answer to that falls smack into the demilitarized zone of a reader's patience. There are ways to depict excess without excess, but the sheer girth of "Rising Up and Rising Down" demands the kind of fabulous commitment only size can give. There is no quick in-an-out; Vollmann rubs our noses in it.

This would be a cruel, almost mean experiment were Vollmann not giving himself over so freely. His openness and curiosity inspire ours; his pain becomes ours, too.

Still, the greatest anguish in "Rising Up and Rising Down" comes not from Vollmann, but from the people he interviews. They are crushed and scoured by the weight of war. In one section, he talks to a woman whose boyfriend was cut into pieces by Croats: "No one has a chance to open my heart again," she says.

"This is what violence does," Vollmann writes in response. "This is what violence is. It is not enough that death reeks and stinks in the world, but now it takes on inimical human forms, prompting the self-defending survivors to strike and to hate, rightly or wrongly."

In spite of its great intentions, "Rising Up and Rising Down" cannot end that cycle. It does help us understand it, though, and that glimmer of empathy is a start.

John Freeman is a freelance writer in New York.

Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company