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Those who dislike weapons oppose them for their function, whereas those who like them appreciate either their function or form. Actual experiences inform one’s dislikes. Vollman gives the example of a woman who hates guns for her association with guns and the murder of her brother by a gun. Vollman dislikes aquatic terror for its reminder that his sister drowned. He says, “[b]oth dislikes are legitimate [but] neither should ought to be imposed” (I, p. 79). 

He notes the separation between beauty and morality. Aestheticizing torture instruments can be damnable, but also qualified, depending on how they are aestheticized. He analyzes the aesthetics of the vaginal pear. Although there is no purpose in aestheticizing this torture weapon, it holds beauty nonetheless, based on its form resembling the human body for the purpose of function. It can be used to commit “hideous cruelty to women–but, […] hideous cruelty to men, too (I, p. 81). He raises the question of whether violence is inherently a male attribute, violence being “inflicted almost exclusively by men upon women” (I, p. 80). To dispte this notion, he presents several examples of ruthless, menacing women who enjoyed torture, including Dorothea Binz, an attendant at Ravensbrück concentration camp, Libyan queen Pheretima, and members of the female Asian gang in Little Saigon. He argues against the notion that women are no less cruel than men largely based on statistics of arrest and homicide rates by gender in the United States. 

Vollman describes a list of weapons with corresponding sketches, arranged on a continuum from ornamentally to functionality. First, he admires the ornamental Rajasthani dagger, for its craftsmanship, symbolization of power and authority, and emblematic value. He says the power of weapons is glamorous. Its “remaining purpose is but to be” (I, p. 95). Next, he personifies the Ghurka knife in saying it “must taste blood whenever it is drawn” (I, p. 84). It was made for vicious purposes. Vollman then describes the Buck Pathfinder, which holds personal sentimental value. This decent general-purpose knife with a utilitarian blade provides him with comfort. Relating the comfort he gets from this knife to power, he cites the Native American belief that living things have power, and that fashioned things have power which is available to the maker or the user. To emphasize the powerful and sacred view of one’s possessions, he includes that a shaman’s pouch is “disposed of with the dead shaman, being of use to no one but him” (I, p. 88).

Vollman describes the value of the Feinwerkbau 65 as accuracy over power. Its precision is derived from its firing mechanism, adjustable windage, contoured grip, and mechanism to reduce recoil. He admires it for its genuine beauty, and beauty serving function. Vollman then goes into the reasons people fire a weapon, including fear of others, desire to defend their lives, desire to kill, firing because it is their job, and insightfully, for the goal of the will accomplishing precisely “its end in this imperfect world” (I, p. 91). On this last motive, he reflects on instances in life in which one’s hopes and expectations come to fruition the way one anticipates, and concludes that this perfect, predictable reality does not exist. The accuracy of this gun allows one to feel refreshed and happy, and “a little closer to that ideal state” (I, p. 92). 

The next weapon Vollman describes, the Sig Sauer, is personified similarly to the Ghurka knife. He says, “the Sig Sauer sought to fulfill itself by luring me into self-destruction” (I, p. 96). Its Platonic virtue and undoubtful purpose is killing; it fully comes to life if used to kill. Vollman notes an encounter with F.B.I. agents, when they questioned him on his interactions with American prostitutes. He indicates that from the prostitutes, he wanted “neither sex nor money, but simply information” (I, p. 97). He also got information from these agents, on the weapons they carry, which were Sig Sauer P226es, the same weapon he owned. He notes that this weapon is “one of the most superb examples of functionality” (I, p. 97). 

The final weapon in this catalogue, the handmade Pakistani Pen-Pistol, is charming not for its functionality, but for its disguise. He describes it as “unsafe and awkward to operate, its capacity a single round” (I, p. 97). The maker’s mark serves as a guarantee because some are known to have blown up in the users’ hands. He then elaborates on the creativity of the gun appearing as something it is not. He comments on hypothetical situations if matter is something other than what it is, such as “if water were fire; if humans were aliens and spies; if flowers were microphones” (I, p. 99). At the end of this thought, he inserts, “if guns could really solve anything— (I, p. 99). He comments on the inadequacy of guns in addressing issues, and perhaps this point translates to brute force or violence as an ineffective approach to problem-solving.

–CM

Vollmann opens “The Days of the Niblungs” by critiquing various optimistic views of the nature and future of humanity. The chapter deals heavily with major political thinkers of the 19th and 20^th centuries, including Arendt, Kropotkin, and Bakunin among others, who, while having often disparate political ideologies, demonstrate a sort of hope regarding human development towards peace. Vollmann doesn’t give up on believing that the world ought to be better, but is hesitant to believe that violence itself can somehow be erased from human culture. However, he describes his agreement with Bakunin’s belief that the apparent universality of some form of violence is not necessarily an indication of its being natural, and thus accepts the premise that progress is possible. Despite the possibility for progress, Vollmann writes, “we need not delude ourselves that ‘history’ has accomplished much in the way of human improvement” (I, p.31). While the forms of violence may change, violence as a component of human nature and thus human culture does not.

In the section titled “Is Violence Displaceable, Eliminable, Sublimatible, or Stimulable,” Vollmann begins to outline the nature of violence itself. One way that violence manifests is from the urge to destroy others, or otherness in the pursuit of homogeneity. Perhaps we satisfy this urge through invasion and pogroms. Another option might be controlled outlets of violence in the way of Roman gladiator fights. Would uncontrolled violence sink if “future mass murderers were given the chance to kill one another on television,” Vollmann asks (I-p.35). This notion presupposes that the urge to act violently is finite and can be siphoned into different channels in a predictably proportionate way. However, Vollmann points out that in the case of the Roman gladiator fights, the effect was not a reduction in violence but in fact an increase in it. In fact, this was precisely the point. By watching gladiator fights citizens were meant to be hardened for war, not appalled by it.

He then considers to the absurdity of every day violence, so to speak, that one might read about in the local newspaper or see described in national crime statistics. Often times the victims of violent crimes, say a woman raped on an elevator by a stranger or an infant beaten to death by her mother, are “mere placeholders” as “violence rises up and takes the sacrifice it finds” (I-p.36). The absurdity of violence is further shown in crime statistics in Japan and the United States where the most common motivations listed on reports are “unknown” and “other.” Because of this, Vollmann is skeptical that policies that attempt to remove the apparent reasons for violence will be completely effective and, in some cases, completely miss the point.

If it is impossible to remove violence what then can be said about the role of developing a moral calculus or writing a book like Rising Up and Rising Down at all? Vollmann’s purpose with this book is to move toward a moral calculus that might arise from the in-depth examination of violence that he offers. He makes no illusions about his ability to radically alter the course of human action with this book, nor does he claim to have “seen enough, suffered enough, or thought enough about violence” (I-38). He makes clear that violence and suffering awes and shames him, but does not invite his own emulation of it.

To begin an examination of violence, or any research topic for that matter, one must be keenly aware of their own ignorance and potential failures in the pursuit of the truth. The truth of any situation is not immediately given up in a succinct and discrete way. Rather, the researcher goes about both collecting and interpreting data in an effort to piece together something that gets at the substantiated truth. This means that even when something seems so clearly true, or might as well be true given the circumstances one, must still seek to corroborate and substantiate the truth of that specific situation. There are many traps one can fall into if they let their own intuition and experience overcrowd their judgement. While Vollmann does not deny that experience is critical, he warns that over time as one gathers more and more bits of knowledge and develops a conceptual understanding of the world, one is more susceptible to miss things that don’t fit their theory.

 Vollmann continues his qualification of pursuing empirical truth by pointing out the often-deceiving nature of “settled data.” For instance, the statistics of the death count under the Khmer Rouge varied widely over time with some early estimates putting the total at 300,000 and later estimates putting the total at more than three million. Vollman makes reference to this not to say that contemporary data cannot be trusted but that it is not necessarily infallible simply because it is recent.

Beyond the fallibility of statistics describing violence, there is of course the qualifying question “what is violence and how do we know it occurred?” To describe where this question might be asked, Vollmann gives a rather controversial example of qualifying crimes like attempted rape based on cultural context. Here he tells a story told to him by a victim of sexual assault where the victim was held in a corner against her will and groped before she was able to escape the situation. The perpetrator had a “rough upbringing,” and as such, according to Vollmann, was not able to understand how his actions could be described as attempted rape. Rather, he merely saw them as normal, if not inappropriate courtship. The point being that crimes should be understood in the specific context of perpetrator and victim and normative ethics fails to grasp this nuance.

He continues this argument by critiquing Hannah Arendt in the context of her famous and controversial work Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. This brief section some scrutiny as it over-essentializes Arendt’s defense of a common humanity and blatantly misinterprets Kant’s ethical framework. Vollman uncritically accepts Eichmann’s claim in the trial that he was following Kant’s categorical imperative by simply following orders and fulfilling his duty. Vollmann writes, “I wish that Kant had been there, for vis-à-vis the ‘I just followed orders’ defense the philosopher expresses agreement” (I-p.47). As Arendt famously points out in Eichmann, this reading of Kant by Eichmann is not only untrue but indicative of his inability to think, the critical piece of Arendt’s argument in the text. To quote Arendt herself in response to Eichmann’s invocation of Kant: “This was outrageous, on the face of it, and also incomprehensible, since Kant’s moral philosophy is so closely bound up with man’s faculty of judgment, which rules out blind obedience.” Vollman uses Eichmann has an example among several, so it is not worth going further in describing Arendt’s or Kant’s position.

Vollmann next considers ways to approach justice. He contrasts it with respect and evaluates whether it is passionate or objective. He asks, in regards to the question of respect, “Do I betray and humiliate those who have trusted me, or do I soften my conclusions?” (I-p.50). Vollman’s guiding principle is that we must respect the human in everyone including those that do evil.

The final parts of this section summarize the motivations and justifications for the book itself. The first half of the book is to be a theoretical account of violence based on the already decided scholarly research on the various topics it draws from. He has provided a complete volume of the moral calculuses he employs throughout the text. Ultimately, he seeks to give as near complete an account of violence and ethics as he can given his decades of research on the topic.

–RW

Catacomb Thoughts

“Death is ordinary.” Vollmann opens his work with a stroll through the ostial labyrinth of the Paris catacombs. As he walks down the tunnels, he observes skeletal remains encompassed in the stone and earth walls. Twisted yellow joints and bones lay laterally, achieving a masonry effect. Napoleon’s engineers of death created the tunnels with an ornamental and “sanitary aesthetic, giving a sense of order to the chaos of a death.” Vollmann arrives at the catacombs ready to look upon his future, among the arid, calcified appurtenances of flesh and bone. Vollmann accepts the choking, sickening dust in the air as a salutary reminder of his own limited existence from the decayed corpses around him. Vollmann wants to understand death since one cannot forget what can’t be avoided. When he emerges into the sunlight, Vollmann morbidly juxtaposes the sweet, starchy French pastries with a “bone-colored cheese” stench. Clearly affected by his time in the catacombs, Vollmann sees and tastes death everywhere. A wedding becomes a “hideously cadaverous” parade, and the ornate architecture of the city resembles skeletal remains. Vollmann concludes that he must die. He confesses he cannot read into the meaning of death per se, but interprets death as an “a smell, a very bad smell.” 

Autopsy Thoughts

Vollmann discusses a young woman found in a dumpster by investigators, murdered and forgotten. The cause of death seems like the prerequisite for justice, but the moral of death is “empty.” Vollmann touches on the death of his sister when he was nine and his sister Julie was six. In his care, Julie drowned. He notes that only when justice condemns someone to death or the wrongful party is implicated, can we admit that death had a point. Principled suicides have meaning for a greater purpose. But, most accidents and homicides die for nothing. Convicting a murderer and executing him means something, but the killing of his victim will not hold any higher meaning. 

Between 1994-1995, around 8,000 people died in San Francisco County. Dr. Stephen became responsible for a fraction of these autopsies. When a body arrives at the office, it is weighed, examined, and zipped into a white plastic bag. Family members try to identify their loved ones in the viewing room, trying to claim the body with a sense of desperate relief. Vollmann then describes an autopsy. In unnecessarily graphic detail, Vollman describes the naked “green and yellow corpse” as a scalpel cuts the flesh from the body’s arms and chest. Intestines are removed, organs weighed, and “the putrefying” brain separated from the body. The morgue doctors are callous in their procedures, but rightly so as they armor themselves to comprehend the unsightly work they do each day. Ironically, the job shelters Dr. Stephen from sadder things, as he previously worked in pediatric oncology. The difference lies within embracing the cold, inevitability of death postmortem versus the life being drained from an innocent child. The former is preferable. 

Continuing with his adventures in the morgue, Vollmann comments on the “little cubes of meat” going into pathology labs. Dr. Stephen and his staff contemplate the odorous stench of organs, which Vollmann finds no qualms with. The staff determines the causes of death, from barbiturate overdoses to suicide. According to Vollmann, jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge because of transient emotional causes, like an inoperable liver cancer diagnosis, is completely logical. Suicide from heartbreak is not. Overall, few very homicides are justified, mostly just a waste. Senseless violent crime to effect punishment hold no value. Before venturing back into the bright world of the living, Vollmann checks with forensic texts about the infectious capabilities of the bodies. He emerges light and unburdened. The singularity of the autopsies hold no candle to the multiplicity of the catacomb skulls. He introspects and questions his own fear; he feels most menaced by death when he was the safest among the corpses. 

Siege Thoughts

Vollmann continues to think about the Paris catacombs, comparing the beautifully arranged skulls to the Cambodian genocide map of murdered skulls. He then talks of a past love who perished from cancer. She wrote letters to him describing her maddening pain, despair, and yearning for death However, Vollmann cannot comprehend her as a sick and decomposing body. She still holds life and energy in his memories. He is sad, her death was meaningless. So too, he is sad when he thinks about his college, Will and Francis, who were killed in Bosnia. He is not angry and acknowledges the commonality of unfortunate incidents during the war. 

Vollmann concludes with some final thoughts on the violence, death, and suffering he has seen. He is haunted by wickedness and personal loss from his time in Sarajevo, working as a journalist. The Angel of Death works in ways we cannot fully understand. Sometimes we have the wrong cells inside our bodies or perhaps we fight in the wrong place at the wrong time. In trying to understand the malignity and sadness of death, Vollmann urges a callous joke or two. Vollmann wants to contribute a sense of comprehension to how and why the Angel kills. Thus, the world is gifted Rising Up and Rising Down.

–A.A.

RURD‘s epic journey to publication was chronicled in a delightful story in McSweeney’s, the magazine cum publishing house that finally accepted the work. Called “An Oral History,” the article recounts the mad rush to fact check the seven volumes of RURD, a task made daunting not only by the length of the series but by the vast erudition apparent on every page. Apparently, the Berkeley library proved invaluable, for both author, who left a trail of notes inside books, and the McSweeney’s editors, too. No point in recounting what the magazine so ably does: read it!

Today, the complete RURD goes for more than $1000 on Amazon and similar sites. But McSweeney’s was kind to work with us here at this website , granting permission to photocopy the books (so students could read them). We appreciate McSweeney’s and William Vollmann’s willingness to make accessible his monumental achievement.

Who is William Vollmann? He was born in Santa Monica in 1959, moving to New Hampshire as a child and later to Bloomington, Indiana, where he went to high school, his father a professor at the local university. He attended his first two years of college at the elite and remote Deep Springs College before matriculating at Cornell, from which he graduated summa cum laude. As a child, Vollmann was bullied, at least according to his own testimony, and a seemingly pivotal event of his youth was the tragic drowning of his 6-year-old sister, who had been left in Vollmann’s care. “I had nightmares practically every night of her skeleton chasing me and punishing me, pretty much through high school,” he has said. “I felt very uncomfortable at home; I felt that I wasn’t exactly wanted there.”Later, equally impactful were the deaths of two colleagues, assistants of a sort, who were helping the journalist Vollmann in covering the Balkan Wars. This episode is discussed at the very beginning of Rising Up, Rising Down.

Early in his career, Vollmann was sometimes linked with novelists like Richard Powers, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and even the much older Thomas Pynchon. But the idiosyncratic Vollmann has shown himself to be sui generis, combining the gonzo journalism of Hunter S. Thompson with the prose style of Nabokov and the ambitions of Zola. After leaving Cornell, he travelled to Afghanistan, first having written to former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, soliciting advice on how the trip might be most fruitful; this adventure, obviously somewhat quixotic, led to his first book An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or How I Saved the World. He later took a job as a computer programmer in Silicon Valley, despite knowing little code. Sleeping under his desk, subsisting on candy bars, writing what would become his first novel, Vollmann quickly completed You Bright and Risen Angels, a gigantic and controversial book informed by frequent visits among sex workers in San Francisco, a long-standing interest, if not preoccupation. Indeed, many of Vollmann’s subsequent novels and short stories (which, with often frightening effect, seamlessly blend fiction and non-fiction) are situated among, and address the daily lives of, sex workers. Ingratiating himself to the skeptical prostitutes, Vollmann has admitted to smoking crack around 100 times. A similar personal and intellectual solicitude has been extended to skinheads and other marginalized groups.

Nothing if not fecund, Vollmann’s books include the following:

Novels and collections

• You Bright and Risen Angels (1987)
• The Rainbow Stories (1989) (collection)
• 13 Stories and 13 Epitaphs (1991) (collection)
• The Atlas (1996) (collection)
• Europe Central (2005)
• Last Stories and Other Stories (2014) (collection) 
• The Lucky Star (2020)
• How You Are (forthcoming) 
• A Table for Fortune (forthcoming)

Seven Dreams series

• The Ice-Shirt (1990) (Volume One)
• Fathers and Crows (1992) (Volume Two)
• Argall: The True Story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith (2001) (Volume Three)
• The Dying Grass (2015) (Volume Five)
• The Rifles (1994) (Volume Six)

The “Prostitution Trilogy”

• Whores for Gloria (1991)
• Butterfly Stories: A Novel (1993)
• The Royal Family (2000) 

Non-fiction

• An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved the World (1992)
• Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means (2003)
• Uncentering the Earth: Copernicus and the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (2006) (Part of the “Great Discoveries” series)
• Poor People (2007)
• Riding Toward Everywhere (2008)
• Imperial (2009)
• Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater (2010)
• Into the Forbidden Zone: A Trip Through Hell and High Water in Post-Earthquake Japan (2011) (eBook)
• The Book of Dolores (2013)
• No Immediate Danger: Volume One of Carbon Ideologies (2018)
• No Good Alternative: Volume Two of Carbon Ideologies (2018)

Europe Central won the National Book Award; RURD was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle award. An avowed admirer of Japanese writers like Mishima and Kawabata (the former gets many quotes in RURD), Vollmann has written books on the Fukushima disaster and Noh theater. The Book of Dolores chronicles Vollmann’s occasional role as a transwoman; How You Are promises more on this front. Yes, we said fecund. Fecund, diverse, confrontational, all.

Overall, Vollmann’s work evinces a deep suspicion of technology and this, when coupled with an obviously deeply unconventional intellect, led the FBI to consider him a suspect in the Unabomber case. No doubt abetting the FBI’s case was Vollmann’s avowed love of firearms. (He once fired a pistol (with blanks) into the ceiling at a reading in New York, and RURD is replete with references to Vollmann packing heat). Having requested his FBI file under the Freedom of Information Act, Vollmann famously wrote of his interaction with law enforcement for Harper’s magazine.

Combining a life of adventure and provocation with humble if slightly peculiar domesticity, Vollmann lives in Sacramento, California. His wife is an oncologist, and the couple has a daughter. (Vollmann’s wife, then only a fiance, makes an appearance near the beginning of RURD). Near his home, Vollmann keeps a large studio where he not only writes but creates art in a number of different media. His photographs are found throughout RURD, as are the occasional drawings (of items like the Sig Sauer pistol to which he sings a paean). His paintings are influenced by Gauguin and Native American art; most of the visual art, according to those who have seen the studio, focuses on sex workers, geishas, and women who Vollmann calls “goddesses.”

To the long but ennobling trip through the unabridged Rising Up and Rising Down.