over-exposure-in-the-atlas-by-william-t-vollmann.pdf

Sillages critiques17 (2014)Exposition / Surexposition

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Franoise Palleau-Papin

Over/exposure in The Atlas by WilliamT. Vollmann................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

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Rfrence lectroniqueFranoise Palleau-Papin, Over/exposure in The Atlas by William T. Vollmann, Sillages critiques[En ligne], 17|2014, mis en ligne le 15 dcembre 2013, consult le 12 mars 2014. URL: http://sillagescritiques.revues.org/3731

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Over/exposure in The Atlas by William T. Vollmann 2

Sillages critiques, 17 | 2014

Franoise Palleau-Papin

Over/exposure in The Atlas by William T.Vollmann

1 In his novel The Atlas (1996), William T. Vollmann inserts eight photos at the beginning andat the end of the book, forming a palindrome in their own right (letter to Franoise Palleau-Papin, 2008), and writes his chapters in a thematic palindrome as well: the first chapter dealswith similar issues as the last one, the second one echoes the second to last, etc. His style alsoreflects this pattern, in the use of symmetrical figures of speech. We will see how the echoesbetween his text and images and within the text alone allow him to create a frame for whatescapes representation or even clear apprehension. In the void or chamber of echoes createdby his symmetries in style and composition, the narrative figure exposes himself, and lays barehis relationships to the world and people around him, trying to connect the self and others.By using such formalism and patterns, Vollmanns personal cartography of the globe bringsnew insight into old questions: the difficulty for the artist to see and to relay the world asauthentically as he wishes; the claim to retain something of experience in an Orphic attemptto capture what has already gone by; and finally, the attempt to see through the others eyes,and to come closer to understanding the relationship between the other and the self.

2 What is at stake in Vollmanns novels, and in The Atlas in particular, is the difficulty to shareexperience, i.e., the aporia of sympathy: how far can the narrator expose himself to experiencehis own, and through compassion, to that of otherswithout destroying himself and withoutlosing himself in the other? The old issue of the artists commitment to mankind and hisinvolvement in the world takes a new form in this particular novel, a carefully assembledcollage of mostly very short chapters, except for the central story which gathers elementsfrom all the other vignettes and recapitulates them into a multi-facetted reflection. In theepisode entitled The Prophet of the Road, the narrator remembers rescuing a woman whowas being eaten alive by mosquitoes in Canada, and as he describes the experience as themost horrible thing [he has] ever seen (40), his graphic description ensures that it becomesthe most horrible thing we remember from the book. At this point his generalization couldbe a comment on his whole philosophical and literary purpose, using the very vivid metaphorof a mosquito bite after the mosquito horror that has just been described:

When I remember that summer, which now lies so far behind me, I must own myself still protected,in a fluctuating kind of way, and so a question hovers and bites me unencouraged: Which is worse,to be too often protected, and thereby forget the sufferings of others, or to suffer them oneself? (38)

3 The question balances rhetorically between others and oneself, with the echo of sufferingsand suffer, bouncing off the mirror that the others face presents to my own. I see myselfin the other, the other sees himself in me, but how does that mirror image actually function?Is symmetry the only model for something unattainable, yet necessary to hope to comprehendthe self as well as otherness? Vollmann answers that nagging question in his life by goingout of his way to see the places and meet the people he describes, and in his art by framinghis novel in recognizable patterns which give further meaning to his descriptions, bouncingoff from one occurrence to another, from one echo to another, and inviting the reader tobecome an active agent in the connecting game of the symmetrical relationships. I would liketo examine a few examples of the various patterns this teeming novel suggests, to exploreVollmanns formal response to such issues. I will first consider the echoes to be found betweenthe authors photographs, which not only form a palindrome in their own right but findfurther resonance in the text of the novel, to examine the interchangeable persona of theobserver and the observed. The second type of examples will deal with the stylistic figuresof speech forming echoes and symmetries in the microcosmic realm of the sentence, and thepauses they provide in the text. Such mirroring figures of speech build up a trope to suggest



the center of the palindrome figure, the abstraction of an elusive union between the self andothers, an asymptotic goal defining a new form of lyricism.

Photo and text for interchangeable personae4 The Atlas presents a gallery of people who have been scarred by life, both literally on their skin

and psychologically. The seventh photograph from the beginning, for example, represents aman severely scarred around his neck in what looks like torture or an assassination attempt.When I asked Vollmann about that picture, he answered that he had taken it at a safehouse onillegal route from Thailand into Shan State, Burma (at that time the territory of Khun Sa, theOpium King)1. Although the man from the photograph does not appear in the text, we findthematic echoes of his scars in several chapters, in particular in the initial section of the firstButterfly Stories (gathered in chapter 14). The whole story revolves around the image ofcutting with a razor blade. In this third-person narrative, the focal character goes to Cambodia,looking for a prostitute he calls his wife. The first chapter goes back to the moment when hemet her during his first trip there, and to the striking episode when she shaved his moustache.The shaving scene is first introduced by the precise and haunting description of the razor bladethe character has just bought. He then explains how the friend he is traveling with, a journalist,used to fantasize as a boy on the horror of having ones throat cut: But the boy who was goingto be a journalist had known at once that the most horrible thing would be to have his throatcut, to feel the razor sawing and slicing through the skin and muscle and soft cartilage of hisneck. For years it made him go weak just to see barbed wire. (58) The barbed wire connectsto the barber whom the focalizing character keeps going to for a shave, and the innocuousgesture of shaving a mans beard is charged with awe and a sense of danger. The barber cutsthe man, just as his wife had when she shaved his moustache, and both occurrences illustratethe danger the character exposes himself to when he goes out of his way to have a relationshipwith people who are so far removed from his world and his culture, but most of all from hisstable financial situation and comfortable way of life.

5 Many other examples from other chapters tend to prove that there is danger andmisunderstanding in relationships closer to home as well, and that the danger lies in anyattempt to make contact with others. Those examples show that hurt cuts both ways. Theforeign characters whose lives the American traveler briefly shares are not left unscathed byhis passage. When he flies away from them to go back home, he leaves false hope behind andthe acute realization for both parties that he may escape when they cannot, as illustrated withthe scarred woman in the besieged city of Sarajevo who bitterly keeps reminding him that hecould not possibly understand (10).

6 In a different perspective, an episode from a previous chapter describes how an old Inuit manbutchers a walrus with great skill:

And the knife went in. In seconds the old man had begun to lay bare the walruss yellowishribs and blue-green membranes behind. His head turned from side to side as quickly as his knifeand he grinned a little with effort as his reddened wrist flowed with perfect skill and confidencethrough the flesh. (23)

7 This could be read as a metatextual metaphor on the art of writing for Vollmann. The writersimagination and skill can also flow with perfect skill and confidence through the flesh.Likewise, the writer butchers the flesh of life to write about it, his pen/knife deftly takingapart the substance of any living person who becomes his prey. For example, he is the discreetvampire of a prostitute when she leaves her jacket behind as a hostage (56), thinking shehas swindled him, in the chapter entitled Brandis Jacket (55), since he can actually readso much from this piece of clothing that he feasts on her in her absence, robbing her of hersoul (56). Using his imagination, he probes into the pockets and recesses of Brandis jacket,and deep into the holes of its lining to find everything she keeps hidden, having transferredher sense of privacy from her rented body to the whole lining of [her] jacket:

I found three lighters, a tube of Vaseline, lots of dirty tissues, a hamburger wrapper wet and yellowwith oil, a broken cigarette, some matches, and finally, like some sweet secret, a little Tootsie Roll.Something about the Tootsie Roll touched me, I dont know why. It was like her, the dearness ofher that the badness drew on and exhibited and used for its own selfish work. (56)



8 To escape the set dichotomies of the good and the bad, Vollmann exposes the way thedearness and the badness of the drug addict bounce off each other in her split personality,just as he explores the way she touches him and is dear to him even though she has liedto him. The sentence follows the intricate reflexive movements between the two parts of thewoman at war in her, dearness and badness playing upon each other, one turning into arelative (that the badness drew on) and a possessive of the other (for its own selfish work,my emphasis). In this passage, the narrator exposes the character of the drug addict, just asmuch as he exposes himself: Something about the Tootsie Roll touched me, I dont knowwhy. He exposes his capacity to be touched by and to observe others, to make sense of themost common things hidden in the lining (56) of their secret places or in the recesses of theirpsyche because they could be his own, in a mirror image capturing the elusive sense of selfone may only see when it is reflected in others.

9 By paying close attention to the style and the grammar connections in language as much as tothe actual relationships between people in life, Vollmann formalizes the gap between himselfand others in the whole novel. To examine the difficulty of any relationship, he uses figures ofsymmetry as a scene on which the interplay of the relation can happen, conveying the dynamicsof the difficult exchange.

Figures of symmetry10 Vollmann structures his writing in this particular work in the form of a palindrome to convey

the depth he perceives in the world, as he explained at a reading:

My feeling is that the main characteristic of reality is that it is infinitely dense and infinitelyexpansive; its always going to be greater than an ability to perceive it. And so the job of an artistis to make something that seems to be greater than you are, that has some kind of depth, so thatyou dont exhaust it when you look at it. Any additional patterns you can add, even if theyre onlyperceived subconsciously, are going to create a little bit more expansion and delay the inevitablemoment when youre tired of this particular piece of art and you want to go to something else.(Reading 2007)2

11 What is more, patterns of symmetry and echoes add intensity and volume to what they repeatin the here and now, enlarging the present, according to Andrew Benjamin in his analysisof versification patterns: repetition will work to delimit the present, turning it into a site ofintensity. (Benjamin 120)3 Thus the fleeting moment that so often eludes our grasp becomesa resonating chamber of echoes inviting recognition and the possibility of understanding.

12 In this work, figures of symmetry abound, not only in the structure of the novel as a thematicpalindrome and in the echoes between chapters, but also in the echoes within the helicoidallystructured chapter sections. The first section of the chapter entitled At the Bridge plays onvariations of the same sentence to stress the loneliness of the observer. The first sentence ismatter-of-fact: I came to the bridge and there was no one there. (156) The narrator goes on toexplain that children usually swim by the bridge, and that he sees the traces of their presence inthe graffiti on the bridge, before adding: And no one was there. (157), a phrase in which theconjunction and connects the childrens absence to his sense of loneliness. He then observespeople waving at him from the road above him, and the conjunction becomes paradoxical:But I was alone. (157), just as he watches others play without being able to connect: I stoodat the bridge and watched them playing. (158)

13 In an essay on the art of Lawrence Stern, Virginia Woolf describes the writer as standing onthe narrow bridge of art, which could be read as a direct comment on the writers positionin Vollmanns chapter At the Bridge:

For, unfortunately, it seems true that some renunciation is inevitable. You cannot cross the narrowbridge of art carrying all its tools in your hands. Some you must leave behind, or you will dropthem in midstream or, what is worse, overbalance and be drowned yourself.

So, then, this unnamed variety of the novel will be written standing back from life, because in thatway a larger view is to be obtained of some important features of it; it will be written in prose,because prose, if you free it from the beast-of-burden work which so many novelists necessarilylay upon it, of carrying loads of details, bushels of factprose thus treated will show itself capable



of rising high from the ground, not in one dart, but in sweeps and circles, and of keeping at thesame time in touch with the amusements and idiosyncrasies of human character in daily life. (22)4

14 Between the pitfalls of overexposure to experience, which Virginia Woolf calls overbalanceand be drowned yourself, and the overburdening of the text with loads of details, Vollmanuses patterns of echoes to create a framework in sweeps and circles and to shunt longerdescriptions, while staying in touch with his subject.

15 In a final occurrence, the narrator concludes the chapter on his solitude in the midst offriendly people enjoying themselves: I was at the bridge and everyone was there. And Iwas alone. (158) Such echoes build up the paradox more forcibly than a long demonstrationwould. They set up a framing device structured helicoidally to present the situation ostensibly,yet with great stylistic economy.

16 At the microcosmic level of the sentence, the style also reflects the symmetry of the frame thewriter sets up: Vollmann uses anadiplosis, the repetition of the last word of a line or clause tobegin the next one, as in: The globe turned outside of him; outside of him life sped like thewinds that pressed any lighthouse cape in Oregon where golden grass-stalks locked the sunin a million-barred prison that continually writhed and gnashed its lips, with the wild sea allaround. (222) The beauty of the wild sea all around is centered on the pause marked bythe anadiplosis, to convey the image of an observer standing like a lighthouse and showingthe way to sailors at sea.

17 Vollmann also uses chiasmus in memorable passages, such as the following one, which seemsto imitate a haiku: Everything was good; goodness was water trickling down sunburnedrock. (216) As in a haiku, the expression is concise; it suggests the summer season, whenthe sun is hot enough to burn the rock; it conveys an impression; and the echo around thesemi-colon may simulate the way a haiku is always spoken twice, in echo (Barthes, 76).Most importantly, this haiku-like sentence appears in the central chapter entitled The Atlasat the core of the palindrome. By imitating a Japanese poem, the traveling narrator of The Atlassuggests the same enigmatic delight in capturing a moment, in celebrating what is. Haikuswere often inserted in travel narratives, like a pause at a turn in the travelers path, to retaina fugitive impression and find rest in the quiet of nature5. The short poem does not describebut gives the fleeting impression for what it is. To take up Lyotards analysis of the limits oflinguistic figuration, it is a figure without discourse (see Lyotard). It does not explain whatwe should feel or understand; it suggests and leaves space wide open for meaning. Thus theform set up as a figure of speech is where the I and the you personae meet, where thenarrator and the reader share meaning without description or prescription. The center of thepalindrome and of all the figures of speech and symmetrical structures at play in the novel isa place of liberty, open to possibilities. It is the overexposed blank at the center of the figurein which creation lives.

Reflecting everything18 With its own set of intricate echoes, the novel is fragmented into many short stories and

vignettes and minute images like a collection of haikus. Our perception of the world isthus scattered into a great many fragments, into many events which reflect the speaker andthe readers identity without a center, as the center changes with every new symmetry,each occurrence reflecting the others in an infinite relationship. Like haikus, the mirrorsof Vollmanns symmetrical and concise formulations do not hold the image they reflect inpassing, they only receive it without capturing it. They work like the empty mirror of the Tao,with its infinite capacity for reception which does not retain an image, as Barthes explainsin Empire of Signs:

The mind of the perfect man, says one Tao master, is like a mirror. It grasps nothing but repulsesnothing. It receives but does not retain.: the mirror intercepts only other mirrors, and this infinitereflection is emptiness itself (which, as we know, is form). (Barthes, 79)

19 The form the novel takes at sentence level as well as in its composition reflects a Buddhistand Taoist syncretism which is thematically acknowledged in the text, when Vollmann jokesabout his authorial character who is influenced by the Buddhist characters he meets: Hed



become a Buddhist like them. (207) Vollmann incorporates a Buddhist worldview in thisnovel revolving around a center of meditation, possibly following the post modern tendency todiffuse a form of spirituality in the secular, according to John McClures study Partial Faiths:Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison.

20 The authorial figure in The Atlas shifts its center of location, its persona, and its viewpointmany times in the course of the novel. It takes the form of a first, second or third personnarrative, it frames experience in emblematic and symmetrical images and fragments, buildingup a mandala or cosmic projection around him, a mental image of the world at the center ofwhich he stands divided6. In the infinite reflections the novel organizes in its recurrent patterns,something of that persona emerges, exposed so many times in so many variations of the patternthat it is overexposed, at once omnipresent and elusive, presenting himself as well as everyone,and presenting us. In keeping with this structure, the image of a body of water reflecting itssurroundings is recurrent in the novel, in the central chapter in particular, exemplifying themirror-like pattern of symmetry at work everywhere.

They passed an abandoned beaver dam in a winding river that reflected everything in the hue ofa sepia-tinted photograph. The river was widening, the trees lowering. Admiring the turf of thewinding banks so overhung with bushes and rich grasses, he said to himself: This is Joes river.If Joe were here with me hed dive beyond those grimacing branches of dead spruces to be withthat virgin he loved; hed find her here. (212)

21 Names, possessives and pronouns gather many characters: they, and reflexively, he said tohimself, and me, Joe and her in their love relationship (that virgin he loved) as wellas ourselves, implied readers; we are all summoned and invited, in a transitive passing downof experience, to share the winding river that reflected everything because the metaphor of asepia-tinted photograph makes it any old picture of our past once it has been tainted over in thesame nondescript color of what no longer is. Vollmanns mirror images and figures of speechframe the ineffable absence between what is and what is not in a non-discursive and figurativemanner; they open the possibilities of an exchange at the heart of reading and writing; andthey define a new lyricism of interchangeable personae, by which, to take up Paul Ricursargument, we can feel the other as the self, the self as the other.

Bibliographie

Works Cited

BARTHES, Roland. Empire of Signs. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, Farrar, Straus& Giroux, 1982.

BENJAMIN, Andrew. Present Hope: Philosophy, Architecture, Judaism. London: Routledge, 1997.

COYAUD, Maurice. Fourmis sans ombre: le livre du haku, anthologie-promenade. Paris: Phbus libretto,1978.

KALTENMARK, Max. Lao Tseu et le taosme. Paris: Le Seuil, 1965.

LYOTARD, Jean-Franois. Discours, figure. Paris: Klincksieck, 1971.

MCCLURE, John. Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison. Athens:University of Georgia Press, 2007.

RICUR, Paul. Soi-mme comme un autre. Paris: Le Seuil, 1990.

VOLLMANN, William T. The Atlas. New York: Penguin, 1996.

_____. Letter to Franoise Palleau, postmarked Sacramento, CA, 5 November 2008.

WOOLF, Virginia. The Narrow Bridge of Art. New York Herald Tribune, August 14, 1927.

. Granite and Rainbow: Essays. New York: Harvest Book, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.11-23.

Notes

1 Letter to Franoise Palleau-Papin, postmarked Sacramento, CA, 5 November 2008.



2 Reading at the Village Voice Bookshop, Paris, June 12. I am gratefully indebted to Odile Hellier, ofthe Village Voice Bookshop, for allowing me to use her recording of the event for a transcription ofVollmanns answer.3 I wish to thank John Sears, from Manchester Metropolitan University, for bringing this studyto our attention in his presentation Monument, Memory, Process: Enactment in Allen FishersPLACE (VORTEX seminar, University of Paris 3, November 22nd, 2008).4 I am gratefully indebted to Nicole Terrien, professor at the University of Rouen, for this referenceto Virginia Woolfs essay.5 After Maurice Coyaud 13-14.6 See Max Kaltenmark: Le Taoste, par cette mditation prliminaire, extrait de lui-mme les emblmescosmiques quil projette autour de lui, constituant un mandala mental, cest--dire une image du mondeau centre duquel il apparat lui-mme divis, condition ncessaire pour entrer en communication avecles dieux. (179).

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Rfrence lectronique

Franoise Palleau-Papin, Over/exposure in The Atlas by William T. Vollmann, Sillages critiques[En ligne], 17|2014, mis en ligne le 15 dcembre 2013, consult le 12 mars 2014. URL: http://sillagescritiques.revues.org/3731

propos de l'auteur

Franoise Palleau-PapinFranoise Palleau-Papin est Professeur de littrature amricaine lUniversit de Paris 13-SorbonneParis Cit. Elle est lauteur dune thse de doctorat sur Willa Cather et dune monographie surDavid Markson (Dalkey Archive, 2011). Elle a dirig une tude du roman The Rifles, de William T.Vollmann (Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2011). Elle poursuit actuellement son tude de la littratureamricaine contemporaine. Franoise Palleau-Papin is Professor of American Literature at theUniversity Paris 13-Sorbonne Paris Cit. She is the author of a PhD on Willa Cather, and of amonograph on David Markson (Dalkey Archive, 2011). She has edited a study of William T.Vollmanns novel The Rifles (Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2011). Her current work focuses oncontemporary American literature.

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Rsums

Cet article tudie la manire dont Vollmann se sert de la photographie et de lcriture en unecomposition en palindrome dans The Atlas, entre autres figures de symtrie, pour offrir uncadre lautre comme soi-mme.This paper examines the way Vollmann uses photography and text in a palindromecomposition in The Atlas, among other figures of symmetry, to frame the other as oneself.

Entres d'index

Mots-cls :Bouddhisme, chiasme, collage, figure (du discours), haku, photographie,surexposition, symtrie, The Atlas, William T. VollmanKeywords :Buddhism, chiasmus, collage, figure (of speech), haiku, overexposure,photography, symmetry, The Atlas, William T. Vollman

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