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About half way through the abridged version of Rising Up and Rising Down, in the transition between the book's "moral calculus" and its "studies in consequences," William T. Vollmann offers a "Note on Inconsistencies." Here he admits to a disregard for stylistic homogeneity and explains it away by recounting an anecdote about Lawrence of Arabia. When the proofreader of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom asked Lawrence why he had spelled the name of his camel in numerous different ways throughought the manuscript, Lawrence simply replied: "She was a splendid beast." And no doubt Vollmann intends for the reader to understand that his book too is a splendid beast — as indeed it is. Parts of it are splendid, even exhilarating. However, it is also a beast. Just as camels spit and stink and shit where they will, so too does Vollmann's book have its animal drawbacks. The avowed intention of Vollmann's ambitious work is to create — moving empirically from practice to theory — a "moral calculus," a grid against which the morality of any act of violence can be measured. Whether it's a revolutionary uprising or a random murder, any violence can be charted against the conditions and contingencies plotted out in the moral calculus. Certainly wiggle room remains, as in any grid. Suppose a police officer shoots a man who, it turns out, was only pulling a cell phone and not a pistol out of his coat pocket. Is the act justified? Where do you insert it into the moral calculus? No doubt the police officer felt justified. On a dark night he was faced with a potentially dangerous stranger. How was he to know the man was armed with nothing more than a cell phone? On the other hand, the man's family raises a hue and a cry in the press. Our father / brother / son was shot — for what? Making a phone call? It's unjustified use of force! Police abuse! Vollmann's moral calculus does not fix the ambiguities in any such act of violence since, as he admits, all violence contains potentially conflicting perspectives. The perpetrators always have their reasons. The perpetrators always think they're right. And the victims always have their reasons too. They always think they've been wronged. The value of the moral calculus, then, is to help understand why some reasons are better or worse than others. If a policeman shoots a man in the dark because he's a nigger, that's a less good reason. If a policeman shoots a man in the dark because he fears the man may shoot him first, that's a less bad reason. Simple enough. A "rising up" is in the author's parlance a justified act of violence. A "rising down" is an unjustified one. The moral calculus helps to understand which is which, and why. It is a noble and brilliant effort on the part of the author to lay out this table of violent possibilities. It's the splendid part of the "splendid beast." And sometimes the writing itself is splendid too — powerful, pungent, even poetic. However, too often the writing itself is the bestial part of the "splendid beast." When a novelist undertakes a quasi-philosophical work, you'd expect him to be weak at philosophy and strong at prose. Ironically, however, it's the exact opposite. Vollmann's prose — it's tempting to say his logorrhea, a word often associated with the writer — undermines his intellectual achievement. As a writer, Vollmann's sins are many. At its best, Rising Up and Rising Down reads like a long rambling letter from a very smart friend. At its worst, it just reads like a long rambling letter. You often get the impression that Vollmann simply fell a little too deeply in love with his own research. Do you really need to read lengthy biographies of Napoleon, Trotsky, John Brown, Abraham Lincoln? Even the Marquis de Sade chapter is tedious — and that's really saying something, since Sade was a particularly colorful character. And if these capsule biographies cause you to suspect the book's premise — it claims to draw its moral calculus from empirical considerations, but how empirical can any argument be when it's so shamelessly based on other books? — Vollmann would seem to address these suspicions by appending a plethora of "case studies" to the second part of the book. These "case studies" are basically journalistic articles he wrote for popular magazines. They feature the author in various war-torn, violence-addled lands. Each is accompanied by a little introduction relating them to the book's premise, but otherwise you get the sense that appending them to the moral calculus was a cheap shot — an attempt to immortalize, to elevate in importance, what was merely disposable journalism. Regardless of whether you think they're worth reading in and of themselves, these addenda add absolutely nothing to the book's argument. To the contrary, they make the book's argument suffer by weighing it down, burying it in frequently self-absorbed contemplations of ravaged places. The moral calculus occupies about one hundred pages of the 733-page abridgement, which has itself been pared down from the seven volume original edition of Rising Up and Rising Down. Prior to the moral calculus, there are about one hundred and fifty pages of relevant reading. And that is precisely where Vollmann the writer failed Vollmann the thinker. The not infrequent moments of stylistic brilliance do not justify the burial of the book's central argument. Reading it, you don't find yourself thinking that your moral notions have been sharpened or clarified. Rather, you find yourself thinking, "Wow! What an incredible act of ambition on the part of this writer!" It's a similar reaction you have to a magician who sits on a pole for thirty days or a performance artist who has himself crucified to the roof of a Volkswagon. You're more impressed with the act of will than with the intellectual or symbolic ramifications. You don't think, "Hm, ethical genius!" You think, "Christ! Seven volumes of this!" What Rising Up and Rising Down lacks, then, is a stylistic calculus — a plan for clarity of thought and exposition. And this is a severe detriment: how can you trust the thinker when the writer so frequently betrays himself? How can you believe in the legitimacy of the moral calculus when a man whose very trade is writing can't manage to compose a cogent book? If you were charitable, you might think that Vollmann managed to toss up a gem by working on the principle, popularly expressed, that "if you throw enough shit at the wall, some of it will be sure to stick." If you weren't charitable, you'd dismiss the book on the principle that, even if monkeys could type up a work of Shakespeare, it wouldn't be of any real significance because it was just a random stroke of dumb luck — some shit sticking to the wall. In the final analysis, it's definitely worth reading in order to decide for yourself, but no one will blame you if you wait for an abridgement of the abridgement. Email this page to a friendTell someone about Supervert Picks - Quills at supervert.com. (Email addresses are not recorded or used in any way.) Your name
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