Borders of Self and Other

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 US / 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’s 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’s 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 nineteenth-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’s 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 the 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 Henry David 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...