Two literary testimonies to human excess, one chastely restrained and the other libidinously expansive, have been occupying me this Advent-Christmas season. That seems appropriate: they approach in their depiction of how excessively, transcendently odd we are as creatures that found in the scriptural lections, daily and Sunday, of the season. Each of the books I have in mind is by one of the more interesting novelists of the last fifty years: William Trevor, born in 1928 in Ireland; and William T. Vollmann, born in 1959 in the USA.
Trevor’s new-ish (summer 2009) novel Love and Summer is an almost-perfect model of restrained, elegant, and very dense prose. That’s not to say his prose is hard to understand: it’s crystalline. It is to say that much is packed into it, and that if you read it attentively (and it will hardly let you do anything else) you’ll often have to pause to absorb the vistas that opened by a phrase. It’s a romance in which there are many loves, all unhappy if Hollywood or Disney provide your standard of what counts as a happy love, but each providing a vignette of what human love is and must be if the Christian account of things is right. That is, riven by its own excess, so intense that it cannot satisfy itself. The principal love story is that between Ellie and Florian, she an orphan raised by nuns, he the offspring of decayed Irish gentry. They’re in Ireland, perhaps mid-twentieth-century: it hardly matters when. Ellie is married to a man who accidentally killed his first wife and child; Florian is a creature of romantic memories (an Italian cousin) and literary hopes (stories in the head). They meet, they love, they part, neither able to fulfill the other’s hopes. The same, with variations, is true of the other lovers: the woman who was abandoned by her first and only lover; the man hopelessly in love with an imagined past; the reality of the lovers and their beloveds visible, palimpsest-like, through their hopes and imaginations. Everything is suggested, nothing made explicit: Trevor makes you work, but it is lovely work, sweetly intense, the work of entering an imagined world which is this one, sublimed.
For contrast, Vollmann’s 2005 novel Europe Central. Where Trevor values compression and suggestion, Vollmann prefers to leave nothing unsaid. Europe Central is probably something over 400,000 words long, and it is far from his longest book (that honor may belong to the recent Imperial, which I’ve not yet read). The book is about the European continent during the twentieth century, and especially about the Russo-German war of 1941-45; or, it is about totalitarianism, Stalinist and Nazi; or, it is about Shostakovich, the principal Russian character in the book; or, it is about violence and despair; or, all of these. Vollmann’s interests have long led him to write about our proclivities for excess in our mistreatment of other human beings, and the big canvas and high intensity of the place and time he treats provide an ideal focus. Almost every character in the book really existed, but Vollmann’s depiction of them is not what would be recognized as factual by a scholar-biographer. He’s after something more interesting than that, something very like what Tolstoy was after in War & Peace: the truth of war, hatred, fear, violence, and large-scale slaughter. He does it in prose that is, to my taste, considerably over-heated; and in that respect he is more like Augustine (in De civitate dei) than like Tolstoy. But he too achieves something quite remarkable, which is to get you, if you read him in the kind of half-bludgeoned trance he seems to want to put you into, to enter and understand the world lived in by mass-murderers and racists, of collaborators with evil, of those who come to see evil as good, of those who resist evil by inner migration, and of those who think they do but really don’t. And above all, he shows what the movement of steel and fire and bullets and gas and bombs forward and back across Europe between 1914 and 1945 was (or might have been) like, and in showing that he provides a figure of the fallen world, which is ours, and neither are we out of it.
Both Vollmann’s and Trevor’s characters dream as humans do, wanting what they cannot have, conjuring phantasms, and acting as if they were real. Their world, like ours, is one of violence and disappointment beyond the measure of reason, a place of the inevitable excess of these horrors, at least until Christ should come again. But each of these writers, in very different ways, shows also that there is more in the world than that, even if there is always that. There is also the beauty of the world, never erased, not even in the gas chambers, the torture pits, and the loneliness of abandonment. Christ’s blood streams in the firmament, even for those, like Faustus who have sold their souls to an imagination of Christ’s absence.
