The kaleidoscopic range of William T. Vollmann’s contributions to literature is not easy to keep up with. His body of work encompasses an experimental novel about a cosmic war between insects and electricity, a meditation on Japanese Noh Theater, a 1,344 page study of a desolate county on the U.S. / Mexico border (from 13,000 B.C. to the present), and a 3,300 page moral calculus on the ethics of violence. A cursory glance at Vollmann’s most recent projects would include: a collection of ghost stories set in locations around the world, an epic novel of the 1877 Nez Percé war, a multi-volume study of global warming, and—most recently—the third installment of Vollmann’s “Transgender Trilogy”: The Lucky Star. Even the most curious and intrepid readers may find themselves wondering how to navigate the staggering scope of this topography without an atlas. Fortunately, this year brings us not only The Lucky Star, but the publication of Daniel Lukes’ illuminating Conversations With William T. Vollmann: a career-spanning collection of interviews with the author that provides tremendous insight into Vollmann’s life and work, as well as the threads that connect his diverse subjects as a whole.

What emerges from Lukes’ anthology is a portrait of a writer who often places his life at great risk to experience firsthand the transformative consequences of being “someone who considers it the duty of a world citizen to step into the other person’s shoes.” Whether discussing his experiences befriending Nazi skinheads, accompanying the mujahideen on their jihad in Afghanistan, train hopping with hobos, kidnapping a child who had been forced into prostitution and smuggling her out of Thailand, attempting to survive alone at the magnetic North Pole (to understand what it was like for 19th century explorers of the Northwest Passage to experience freezing to death), or attending Saddam Hussein’s birthday in Iraq, Vollmann’s intent remains to “forge a fragile link between people programmed to hate or ignore each other,” as he tells Jonathnan Coe in one of Lukes’ collected interviews. “Every group of people thinks their world is the whole world,” Vollmann elaborates to Paul Oldfield in 1989. “In every case, it’s as if the light’s being bent by gravitation so that they can never get to see anything outside their own little circle. What I’d like more than anything would be if these little worlds could see each other.”

Across decades of conversations Lukes has collected, we find Vollmann perpetually hacking his own guerrilla paths between these worlds, tunneling through the leaking sewer pipes and cockroach-infested edifices of the boundaries we draw—inwardly and outwardly—to compartmentalize the world, ourselves and others. Paraphrasing Thoreau in a 2017 conversation with Hannah Jakobsen, Vollmann suggests “it’s so important that we never let our knowledge get in the way of what’s really much more helpful which is our ignorance…like when I’ve ridden the freight trains, I try to keep that in mind. I don’t know even where I’m going, what I’m gonna see, who I’m gonna meet, and so I just try to be open, like a child. And then, I have some chance of actually learning what reality is.” Empaths are by nature transgressors, for whom the border walls of their own culture are easily perceived as arbitrary constructions impeding a deeper experience of what it means to be fully human. As a character named Letitia puts it in Vollmann’s latest novel The Lucky Star, “if all that people think about me are certain conceptions…then that shows a willingness to simplify me so they can deal with me quickly.” Vollmann’s center of gravity—uniting all his work—lies in exploring and crossing the manifold border regions between Self and Other, where individuals and cultures often impose the limits of their imagination upon the vast continuum of the human experience in order to domesticate it. The spaces dividing the U.S. from Mexico, the rich from the poor, Native Americans from their colonizers, Stalinists from Nazis, terrorists from freedom fighters, climate change deniers from believers, and other such borderlands we tend to riddle with lines in the sand to buffer ourselves from the suffering and transformation that accompanies genuine empathy.

Reading Conversations With William T. Vollmann in an era characterized by the rapid proliferation of media-induced echo chambers feels not just timely, but urgent. Carson Chan and Matthew Evans suggest in one interview that “American mythology is founded on being able to change who you are - perhaps one of the strongest cultural incarnations of an Ovidian ethos,” before asking Vollmann: “Do you think we’ve lost that capacity?” The book provides a dynamic spectrum of answers through its portrait of a writer uninhibited in his explorations of the human capacity for metamorphosis. The Lucky Star extends those explorations to theological heights. “As for me, I rejected St. Augustine’s weird certainty that what suffers no change, is better than what can be changed,” the book’s narrator speculates, calling into question whether any inflexible crystallization of ideals—including a God who is a “perfect,” unchanging manifestation of them—is more worthy of our devotion than any flawed human being capable of transformation and growth. The novel masterfully explores this theme through a dynamic range of characters, including a protagonist who is a syncretic incarnation of both eastern and western concepts of divinity: “We called Neva the bodhisattva—or, if you prefer, the saint who after dying and being rewarded with heaven could not endure to stay there, but, true to nature, set out straight for hell to be with the eternally afflicted and oppressed.” The oppressed in this case are the subject of Vollmann’s latest border crossing: the persecuted migrants seeking a better life at unsanctioned crossings of the gender divide. “The overt emergence of transgender people,” Vollmann tells us, “is an exciting, indeed astounding, hallmark of American Ovidianism.”

The Book Of Dolores

Vollmann’s “Transgender Trilogy” begins with The Book of Dolores (2013), chronicling the author’s gradual development of a female alter-ego “Dolores” through his experiences cross-dressing and the impressive range of visual arts he employs to document it (including 19th century photographic techniques, Japanese woodblock prints and watercolors). Emphasizing his identity as a heterosexual male, he tells Stephen Heyman: “My work is all about trying to empathize with the other…I’ve always heard women say, ‘I don’t like going out at night by myself.’ I’ve heard it, but I never really got it.” Once in public, Vollmann-as-Dolores became an immediate target of insults, catcalls and rocks. “I tried to imagine myself as a woman,” Vollmann explains, “my reasons were many…marginalized people have always haunted me…having in previous novels imagined the persons of a 17th century Huron Indian, a 20th century Russian composer, a 10th century Norse outlaw…I thought to embody some of my…meditations about gender in the form of a woman whose circumstances require her to define herself in relation to maleness.” This experimental research will be transmuted into a fictional Dolores, the protagonist of the second book of the trilogy, How You Are (currently unpublished).

The Lucky Star inhabits the same fictional world as How You Are, but can be read as a standalone work. Dolores appears in the novel only as a memory, focusing instead on a large cast of characters navigating various gradations of gender and sexuality, including a trans woman attempting to metamorphose from a man named Frank into her idol Judy Garland. As each of them struggles to find love and dignity in a world predisposed to marginalize and degrade them, the novel becomes a reflection on “the violation of boundaries,” as Vollmann articulates in the Afterword, as well as “those strategies, inspiring, pathetic, sacrificial, unhealthy and otherwise, through which the violated try to go on living.” Originally titled The Lesbian to highlight the tragic ironies of Neva’s inability to escape the impact of others’ mislabeling, her strategy for living with trauma becomes Messianic: selflessly bearing the burdens and projections of others, transforming herself into the unique manifestations of unconditional love each of them needs, forsaking her freedom and wholeness to enable others to discover theirs. In the process, she becomes an embodiment of the divine to the regulars of the Y Bar, and a vehicle for Vollmann to imagine what even a purportedly transcendent nature must endure in the crucible of metamorphosis we call love. The manifold ways Neva communes with each of her apostles through the sacrament of sex becomes the altar upon which the human struggle to perceive the nature and presence of God plays out.

“Some will love you as jealous lovers,” explains a witch preparing Neva for her role as Goddess, “and some like children, you see, unconditionally but without knowledge, and some like sinners hoping to hide inside you, and some to justify themselves over others.” Developing a recurring motif of The Wizard of Oz (who appears in different forms to those who seek him), one character muses, “We pretended to ourselves that [Neva] was ‘faithful.’ But that is only a way of explaining it to whoever cannot understand. The real truth is that she belonged to each of us only, just as God does...How can each of us know and feel how others love? In a field of sunflowers, why doesn’t each plant convert its solar nourishment into identical leaves and petals?” In yet another parallel to The Wizard of Oz, some of Neva’s devotees question whether the treasures they sought from her were in fact already within them, merely awoken by her presence.

In the book’s multifaceted reflections on the nature of the God and incarnation, we hear not only echoes of The Wizard of Oz, but of Meister Eckhart, Aquinas, Rabi’a, Hadewijch, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Thomas Merton, Charles Williams and Gustavo Gutiérrez. One of the remarkable achievements of the book is that it manages to be in conversation with all of them. Yet it’s counterbalanced enough to consider whether their ideas, like those of the apostles in The Lucky Star, may be no more than anthropomorphic projections; attempts to circumscribe within our understanding that which ultimately is a mystery: “And so the star gazes serenely on our world from afar. We are all new to her. She perceives us in catlike fashion - which is to say, not without, but beyond understanding us. Stare into a cat’s eyes and what consciousness stares back?”

Some readers may feel, as I did, that The Lucky Star loses momentum in its monotonous—and often wheel-spinning—depictions of relentless sexual encounters, and would have benefitted from being shorter. But the potency of its engagement with profound religious and spiritual questions make it worth the struggle. The Lucky Star is a poignant exploration of the complex dynamics of love and the varieties of religious experience. It stands in dialogue with many great thinkers from across the centuries, whether Muslim, Buddhist, Jain or Christian. Perhaps most importantly, it reminds us that if we are to seek God (or Goddess), we should lower our eyes from the heavens, toward that which is so close it is nearly as invisible: our neighbor.

-Steve Elkins
Spring 2020