Preamble
Come one come all, my bright and risen angels! It’s a damn good day to be literate because I have discovered none other than the inimitable William Tanner Vollmann (air horn optional). How I made it this long without discovering the man’s work is truly a marvel of nature. ‘Cause, this is the kind of author who seems purpose-built to my particular literary taste.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Welcome to Episode 3 of W.A.S.T.E. Mailing List. As always, I’m your host Seth. Let me start by saying, I apologise for the delay in releasing an episode. Between my group reads, carving out time for my review copies, and recent podcast appearances, I let myself get a little behind on video content. I said before, I’m willing to sacrifice consistency in favour of taking more time out to produce (what I hope is) more substantive content.
Mercifully for you, I don’t have much in the way in preamble today. I’d be remiss, of course, if I didn’t thank you, sincerely, for taking a peek at my previous episode on Animal Money.
The recognition I received from both you as an audience, as well as the author himself was just as affirming as it was for the Melancholy of Resistance episode. So as always, thank you very much for your attentive, open-minded viewership. It completely justifies the effort.
This was not meant to be Episode 3… or even 4. If you listened to my interview on Beyond the Zero (shameless self-promotion, I know) you may have been expecting a different video for today. Don’t worry, that episode is still in the works. But I’m just stewing on it a little longer before I put it out there for public consumption. So, in the meantime, you’ll just have to tide yourself over with a little bit of Vollmann love.
As I alluded to at the top, I was immediately and profoundly taken by Vollmann as a writer, and there is regrettably, very little critical or appreciative content toward him on YouTube. Chris Via has done an incredible job of championing his work, but other than that, video reviews and analyses of his books are few and far between. So, I figured I’d do my best to offer him my own, freshly initiated take.
As I’m sure the length has already made apparent, today’s episode is on the longer end of the spectrum. I really went down the rabbit hole with this one, and so today’s post includes sections on companion works, Vollmann’s professional history, critical responses, and a fairly comprehensive analysis of the plot, characters, and themes. If you want to skip some of the extra-textual stuff and get right into the content of the book itself, I’d encourage you to jump forward to Section 5: The Cartoon. And if you want to get into a deeper thematic analysis of the book as a whole, then Section 10: Cowboys and Indians is where you’ll find it. If you’re considering reading it and want to go in cold, then I’d suggest you jump to Section 11: Recommendations.
I realise the length of this episode will be a limiting factor for some of you, so please don’t hesitate to split it over multiple sittings. In addition, I’ll include a link to the audio version of today’s episode here. You can flick through it in whatever format suits you best.
Onward.
VOLLMANNIA
Let’s start by offering credit where it’s rightfully due. If there is one singular source I can credit for my discovery of Vollmann, it would be, unsurprisingly, the VOLLMANNIA podcast. Unfamiliar? Let’s fix that.
VOLLMANNIA is a new author-centric show hosted by two stellar members of the online literary appreciation and scholarship community: Jordan Rothacker and Ryan Alexander. I’ve been in touch with these guys for a while now and was ecstatic to hear about the release of their podcast. We should count ourselves exceptionally privileged to have two minds as sharp as these providing long-form, analytical content on Vollmann’s work. As of this recording, they’ve just released their debut episode on An Afghanistan Picture Show. By the time this video goes live, they may have already released their second episode on, uncoincidentally, You Bright and Risen Angels.
Ryan and Jordan, if you happen to be reading this, I hope I’m not stepping on your toes by releasing an episode near to your own. I don’t ever want you to think of me as a competitor, just another fan (albeit, a less well-read one). At the time of this writing, Episode 2 of the show isn’t out yet, but it may be out by the time this is edited and gone live. I can assure you, regardless of timing, I’ll be downloading it the second it’s out.
Suffice it to say, I have these two to thank for spurring my interest in Vollmann, and hopefully yours too. If you’re even remotely curious about exploring the author’s work, I highly recommend you check out their podcast for an exceptional level of scholarship.
The Programmer
Prior to encountering the podcast, I really only had a loose name recognition when it came to Vollmann. That’s really quite surprising to me, as he’s spent most of his life trafficking in the same literary circles I’ve come to consider my own personal canon. My understanding – which is open to correction – is he’s been friends with the likes of Wallace, Franzen, and Powers for years. People have even gone so far as to call him a literary heir to the likes of Thomas Pynchon. Is that a fair comparison? Well… we’ll get to that.
A brief digression
We really oughta start a drinking game for this channel. Here’s the first rule: every time I mention the name Pynchon, take a shot. By the end of today’s episode, I guarantee you you’ll have a solid buzz on. Does that make me a comparative one-trick pony? I’ll leave that for you to decide.
Disregarding my own delayed discovery of Vollmann, I was even more taken aback by how niche his readership is. And that’s in spite of (what I consider to be) a pretty broad appeal. He receives very little acclaim in the online fiction appreciation world – Bookstagram, Booktube, Book Twitter, and so on. He gets the occasional mention here and there, but nowhere near to the degree that I expect for someone of his literary calibre.
While Goodreads is by no means an exhaustive population sample of an author’s audience, I think it can provide a decent metric for evaluating who is and isn’t reading one’s work. When browsing his profile, I see that his most well-read novel has only a little over 2000 ratings, while his least has less than 50. That is shocking to me, given the depth of prosaic skill, the breadth of his narrative and thematic interests, and just his sheer output. We’re talking 27 books to his name and counting, several of which clock in well over a thousand pages. At the risk of getting repetitive, it really is surprising to me that he remains so widely under-read. I don’t think difficulty or complexity are the barriers to entry here. He’s no more obtuse than someone like Pynchon [drink] who has an enormous readership.
Regardless of his audience, let’s talk about the man himself, within the context of You Bright and Risen Angels, because I think the story surrounding its writing is worth telling on its own. If you’re familiar with Vollmann’s work, you can probably guess what story I’m going to tell next, so feel free to jump ahead if it’s old news for you.
After returning from Afghanistan in the early 80’s after the series of events that would eventually comprise his first book, An Afghanistan Picture show, Vollmann took a job as a computer programmer in a small San Francisco-based technology park that would later come to be known as Silicon Valley. During his time working there, he would stay late in his office cubicle until all of his colleagues went home for the day and then hide under his desk until the janitors finished their cleaning and went home too. Once his office was entirely vacant, that’s when his real work would begin. It was under these conditions that he wrote You Bright and Risen Angels.
You see, this was the early 80s when personal computers weren’t the taken-for-granted, dime-a-dozen utensils we all have convenient access to. Vollmann was forced by necessity to write his debut novel on his office machine under the cover of night so his supervisors wouldn’t find out about his clandestine creative project. He would stay up at all hours, subsisting on whatever the vending machine had to offer him, and grabbed what few hours of sleep he could in a sleeping bag… in his cubical… tucked behind a garbage bin. If that’s not a commitment to one’s craft, I don’t know what is.
Honestly, I have no idea to what degree this story is apocryphal, but of anyone I could see doing this, Vollmann would have to the one. The plot of Angels itself directly references this story as well (more on that in a bit) which does lend credence to its authenticity. For the sake of my faith in the eccentricities of artists, I choose to believe the myth. The story becomes even more remarkable when you look at the finished product he produced. This isn’t some slim, timid attempt to establish an authorial voice. This is an author who seemingly burst from the womb, fully-formed and assured of his himself as a writer of maximalist metafiction. We’re talking over 600, densely packed pages of highly convoluted cyberpunk, revisionist history. Now if I’m losing you with its characterisation, just disregard all the cultural baggage tied up in those terms and remember the malleability of genre signifiers. These same elements have been ascribed to Burroughs and Pynchon [drink].
I dug up a great article from the New Republic which has this to say about the publication of You Bright and Risen Angels:
“Anyone who’s taken a lot of creative-writing classes, or taught creative writing, has learned to dread a certain kind of manuscript. It’s long, for one thing; it has irritatingly small type; it’s grammatically meticulous when it comes to everything but punctuation, for which it has developed its own system of Tolkienic elaboration. An unagented manuscript of roughly this description landed on the desk of Esther Whitby, an editor at the British house André Deutsch, in 1985. Rather than do the sensible thing and reject it, Whitby went ahead and published You Bright and Risen Angels, Vollmann’s bizarre fantasia of insect war.” - New Republic
Vollmann should consider himself very lucky to have had Whitby as his beta reader, as Angels has quite a high barrier to entry. I mean that fairly literally; it’s a dense 650 pages, and the first 150 of them are entirely devoted to an alternative history of electricity before the plot truly kicks off. But once again, I’m getting ahead of myself.
I’d also like to orient you with my word choice as we move forward through this video. If I use the term “the author”, I’m referring to a character in the book. If I’m speaking about Vollmann directly, I’ll use his name. The reason for that will become clear shortly.
Angels at a Glance
I read the 1988 Penguin reprint of You Bright and Risen Angels.
As alluded to above, it was first published in 1987 by André Deutsch, with a very young, leather-clad Vollmann covering the entire reverse cover.
First editions of this novel are surprisingly inexpensive these days – you can pick one up for under a hundred bucks, often with a signature to boot. Regardless of the edition you’ve read, the intention of this section is to offer a bit of orientation as to what to expect when you crack the book open for the first time.
The dedication is to “Paul Foster, [a] true friend”. I went trawling around for some insights into who Paul Foster was but came up dry. If any more learned Vollmann scholars know the answer to this one, drop me a line.
The first of many epigraphs reads: “Only the expert will realize that your exaggerations are really true”. This is attributed to Kimon Nicolaides, a Greek-American teacher and artist, from his book The Natural Way to Draw. I don’t think I’m stepping out on a limb by suggesting this has both practical and thematic relevance. There’s a number of bizarre line-drawing by Vollmann himself peppered through this novel.
The next extra-textual attribution is from Vollmann himself, in the form of another dedication:
“This book was written by a traitor to his class. It is dedicated to bigots everywhere. Ladies and gentlemen of the black shirts, I call upon you to unite, to strike with claws and kitchen pokers, to burn the grub-worms of equalities brood with sulfur and oil, to huddle together whispering about the silverfish in your basements, to make decrees in your great solemn rotten assemblies concerning what is proper, for you have nothing to lose but your last feeble principles.”
Without digging too deeply into that here, all I’ll say is… damn. He’s giving Mario Savio’s speech at Sproul Hall a run for its money,
Next, you’ll find, “A Social Gazette of the Personalities Interviewed for this Book”. This is effectively a character list, featuring all the key players in the novel, as well as their allegiances and affiliations (which, it’s worth mentioning, are numerous). Here’s an example:
“Our hero (Bug): Atheist, spy, revolutionary, one-time insect ally; founder of the Kuzbuite movement; aged 44 in the Year 1 of the Revolution; university graduate.” – p. iv
My suggestion to you is to bookmark or tab this page, as I found myself referring to it very regularly. By my count, there are over forty characters and groups listed here who play a significant role in the book. I can’t speak for you, but my memory is far from eidetic, so this made for a really convenient reference page.
What follows this, is a “Transcendental Table of Contents”. Don’t ever accuse me of not doing anything for you guys, because I did the oh-so-tedious task of counting up the chapters in this book. The novel is broken down into 14 sections, and (if my arithmetic is to be trusted) 227 named chapters, each one of them with an epigraph... technically. We’ll get to that.
There’s a part of me that thinks Vollmann might just be showing off a little with all these epigraphs. There’s clearly some scholarly dick swinging going on here with respect to how widely he’s read. We’re talking quotes from Child of the Storm, Thomas Edison’s Notebooks, St Basil’s letters to the Bishop of Nicopolis, The American Handy Boy’s Notebook, Army Field Manuals, the novels of Jean-Paul Sartre, the list goes on… and there’s an added wrinkle. You could just accept that these obscure references to fringe works as properly attributed… or you could exercise your caution and recognise their dubious authenticity. And I think the suspicious origins of these quotes does serve a higher thematic function, but we’ll get to that in a bit.
Now there’s no way in hell I’m going to list off all these chapters, but let me give you an overview of its sections:
Shape-Shifting (1)
A History of Electricity (7)
The Earplugs (139)
The Arming of the Great Republic (199)
Reactionaries Forever (379)
Shape-Shifting (The Real Identity of Captain Freiheit) (625)
The Rein of the Bugs
In the Office
The Little Match-Seller
Annals of the Bugs
The Labours of Wayne
The Big Fence
The Mausoleum
Shape-Shifting (The Fulfillment of All Intentions)
If you’re following along closely, you may have noticed the pagination drops off after Part 6. That’s no accident, as this is what makes it a “transcendental” table of contents. Despite the hundreds of additional chapter titles beyond the second Shape-Shifting interlude, these chapters don’t actually exist (at least in the written narrative). The reason for this formal conceit is open to interpretation, and I think I’ll save that for a little bit later in the discussion.
In reading these, you may be thinking to yourself… “what the hell is this book even about?”. I think it’s high time we got there.
The Cartoon
You Bright and Risen Angels is a decidedly multilayered book. Put simply, it’s the story of an alternate history of America in the century following the invention of electricity. While electricity represents the focus of much of the power struggles in the book, the primary conflict is a war waging between the human forces of the American Republic and an indigenous race of sentient insects that populate the country they’ve colonised.
This should be ringing allegorical alarm bells right from the jump… but let’s backtrack.
The opening quarter or so of the book details, in frustratingly non-linear fashion, the circumstances that lead to the creation and widespread dissemination of electricity across the United States. Only it’s not quite the version of America we’re all familiar with today. In Vollmann’s world, the political parties that govern the country aren’t separated in left/right, blue/red affiliations. Rather, the key political power groups (at least the human ones) are broken into Reactionaries and Revolutionaries.
Look, it would not be a stretch at all to draw comparisons between these two groups and the main parties in the modern American political context. But to do so would be done at the risk of getting into very dicey territory and I’m not really interested in inciting arguments in the comments section. So, I’ll leave to draw your own comparisons.
Let’s start with the Reactionaries. This group is led by the insipid, colonial tycoon Mr. White (aptly named). White is responsible for the majority of power generation in the American west and holds a monopoly over the electrification of the country. Think of him as a jingoist analogue to Thomas Edison with a hysterically xenophobic bend. He works closely with the polymath Renaissance man, Dr. Dodger, who we’ll be getting into detail on in a later section.
The other major group vying for power are the counter-cultural analogues, the Revolutionaries, led by the alleged hero of the story Bug (also appropriately named). He operates as a sort of eco-terrorist resistance leader and eventually joins forces with the third major power group in the novel: the insects. Vollmann may have labelled him as the “hero” of the book from the start, but I don’t think his sociopolitical sympathies clearly lie with either side of this conflict. I view him as more of a dispassionate anthropologist of this oral history.
Despite the constant conflicts between the Reactionaries and Revolutionaries in isolation, the Insects also represent a source of opposition in the book. They’re a species of large humanoid creatures, that seem to have existed for as long as colonists have been present in the country. Throughout the novel, Vollmann depicts a bloody history of inter-species genocide, segregation, and persecution.
Stay with me here.
There’s a fourth, more nebulous power force present in the novel, the one that exerts the clearest sense of control over the world of Angels: the mysterious Blue Globes. For all the obfuscation and vagueness that surrounds them, they appear to be a species of pure, concentrated, electrical power, complete with consciousness, intelligence, and insidious intent. Mr. White, being the imperial technocrat he is, views the Blue Globes in an exploitative light: a resource. As a result, he and his Reactionary forces seek to control the Blue Globes in order to further exert their electrical influence over the country.
Let’s recap: Reactionaries, Revolutionaries, Insects, Blue Globes.
These four forces are in a constant interplay of violent conflict, and exploitation, forming shaky alliances that fall apart just as quickly as they form, with double- and triple agents ingratiating themselves amongst the various groups. What we’re given as a whole, is a sort of bohemian oral history of the country in the years leading up to an all-out war between humans and insects, with electricity constantly present as a tool of power and control.
In my first video, I described a system of conflict in The Melancholy of Resistance:
“In Krasznahorkai’s ontology everything exists on a spectrum of that which resists, and that which opposes resistance”.
I think the same spectrum could be applied to Angels. Part of my intention behind the W.A.S.T.E. Mailing List project is to curate a selection of books that exist in a lineage of like-minded thematic concerns. The interplay between oppression and opposition is a key theme that links all three of the novels I’ve covered so far. The Reactionaries resist the Blue Globes’ desire for unlimited power (both literally and figuratively) by weaponizing them, and the Revolutionaries oppose them through violent uprising. A '“melancholy of resistance” could be applied here when we realise their collective fate has already been sealed. Fatalism is a dominant theme present in the book.
More on that shortly.
Source Code
When I first detailed my broad description of the plot, I referred to it as a book of layers. Some people would be more inclined to give it a more academic designation and call it a ‘frame narrative’ (fair play to you). The author of this story isn’t giving a factual, historical retelling of America’s history, but rather constructing a program.
Let me explain.
The first proper chapter of the book is titled “Synthetic Cognitions A Priori”, part of the “History of Electricity” overture, and begins in the following way:
“Oh, you bright and risen angels, you are all in your graves! I, your author, am lonely; there is no one left in the world. Since I run things here half the time, I am going to call you up for another of my meaningless judgements – meaningless because you are all so eager and try so hard that I could never punish any of you, no matter how villainous you might be. I press the resurrection button; and here you come as large as life.” – p. 9
This is the first of many frame narrative interjections, from which we’re slowly led to the understanding of what’s really going on here. What we’re actually reading is a sophisticated piece of software written by an unnamed programmer. As he says in his opening lines, he’s the only one left in the world (or is he?). He’s lonely and he’s played this game – his program – many times before. This suggests that some apocalypse may have occurred in his past, leaving him and his computer the only remaining artefacts of a destroyed world. Whether or not that’s actually the case remains unanswered until the final chapters of the novel.
To quell the loneliness of his solitary existence, the programmer/author resurrects all the dead players, making it apparent from the first page the fate that awaits them: death. Bug, Mr. White, Wayne, Parker, Dr Dodger, and so on. They’re all risen from the dead, only to start their story all over again, with their endings sealed into a program.
The degree of control that the author is able to exert over the events of the story is intentionally unclear. He makes broad assurances in the beginning, that he’s the one writing the narrative as it unfolds. What is clear pretty early on, is that he has a vested interest in the success of the Revolutionaries. But what we come to realise as the story unfolds is that there’s actually more than just him programming the outcome of this story.
“I will be especially faithful for these first few pages, since in the beginning of the story I cannot but be reminded that every key-stroke I make upon my type writer may be transmitted through the wall outlet just behind my head (for I do not pretend to understand electricity), […] for I do have my own goals, both long-range and intermediate; and I am confident that my presence here makes some difference.” – p. 12
The use of a computer program as a framing device is fairly unconventional in literary fiction. But at the time, Vollmann considered it a fitting sort of… ‘Petri dish’ to explore the ideas he was fascinated in.
“What You Bright and Risen Angels turned out to be was a monograph on certain experiments conducted in my ethical laboratory—experiments involving the most powerful reagent: cruelty.”
– Expelled from Eden, the William T Vollmann Reader
Think of this program or “cartoon” as a sort of anthropological simulation, wherein the characters are written into the code, and set free in a sort of sandbox environment to interact with one another as they see fit. Within this program, we witness the nuances of identity politics, group-think, and violent conflict as the players roam through this open world. The implication in those opening lines is that this simulation has been run before… many, many times. The novel we’re reading is just one of many permutations of that source code. The author explicitly alludes to this in the chapter titled “Station Identification”.
“The keys of my typewriter depress themselves and clack madly, like those of a player piano, like (more appropriately still, since we are in the age of electricity) a teletype machine in some computer center at three in the morning, with lights glaring steadily down, failed programs in the wastebasket and punchcards on the floor.” – p. 15
What this Station Identification sequence also reveals is that the author has another nefarious force to contend with when it comes to writing his program. We’ll be getting to that in the next section.
It should be uncoincidental that Vollmann chose the role of programmer for his narrator, given that’s the job he was employed as while writing the book. This is a rare example of metafiction done right, but be mindful as we lapse into my own opinions here. I usually bristle at novels that draw attention to their own artifice. More often than not, I find that all it achieves is a loss of my immersion in the story and doesn’t offer any broader thematic insights. Whereas here, I think Vollmann takes a clever and unconventional approach when confronting the idea of ‘history as a subjective construction’, making it apparent that what we’re reading is a story, a game, a cartoon, constructed at the hands (literally) of an individual. Is it a depiction of the events that led up to the Programmer being the only person left in the world? Or simply a thought experiment of a man alone at a computer terminal with nothing but time on his hands? I think Vollmann very smartly leaves that question open to interpretation.
The Eternal Winner
Allow me to convolute this story even further. There’s another character who bears significant influence on the story who I haven’t mentioned yet. The very first pages of the book – from the section titled “Shape-Shifting” – are told from the perspective of a being that refers to itself as ‘Big George’.
Big George is an anomalous force, a character who can move limitlessly through its many metatextual and historical layers. On the one hand, he alleges to be a supervisor to the author, but also a key player in the cartoon itself. He pops up at various points in the narrative history, from the early days of colonial America, all the way up until the revolutionary war that ignites in the latter half of the book, implying some degree of immortality.
“Now who could that be, I suggest, but Big George, and who could he be but pure electrical consciousness itself, insinuating itself everywhere, drifting in and out of all stories and machines…” – p. 111
The nature of Big George is made hazy from the beginning, by design. He’s described as “pure electrical consciousness” and has the capacity to exert his will over any aspect of the program, the characters, even the author himself. What we can say with some degree of certainty, is that he is a physical manifestation of electrical power. That’s not an arbitrary elemental distinction, as electricity bears both material and thematic significance in the novel.
He claims that “I may disguise myself as any animate or inanimate object in what follows” (p. 4). What we find as the story progresses, is a constant push and pull between the author and Big George, as the two interject and interrupt another other, fighting for narratorial control. The author will often dial out of the program to wax lyrical about his resentment toward Big George.
“All across the room the other programmers rest their heads in their arms as Big George dictates to them as well, garbage in and garbage out, screwing up everything with his little spots of fun, refusing to drowse in the spurious closure of a third-person narrative.” – p.15
The author clearly hates Big George and his constant undercutting of his actions when favouring Revolutionaries. He cries out in helplessness as Big George modifies and corrupts the final program, leading us to the understanding that the author’s control was not as clear cut as we initially thought.
“Though I want this story to come out happily it will not and Catherine will fall down and die; can you understand that, she will die, and our hero will die because though I pound at my keys, trying to type in
reformat program command 25 save Catherine after all please I beg you save Catherine
it will do no good because such writing is a big fake that doesn’t even show up on the roll of blue-lined computer paper; only what Big George vomits from his hard heart is what stains the story and even my skilled skull is full of it.” – p. 17
Big George makes a habit of “lying through his teeth and confusing the reader with discrepancies in places and dates, for he just doesn’t care". The outcome is a constant tug-of-war with unreliable narration and confabulation, between a supposedly authentic author, and an omniscient, all-powerful presence that floats in and out of the story at will, corrupting its legitimacy along the way.
It’s important to orient yourself to this conceit early on, otherwise, you’ll find the constant changing of perspectives and interstitials to be really disorienting. That was my experience. On my first pass, I made it 100 pages and had no idea what Big George was and why the narrator kept switching, so I had to go back and read it again slowly. Consider this my PSA to you.
A Bug’s Life
For all its metafictional and experimental mechanics going on at the level of prose and narrative, You and Bright and Risen Angels seems like a pretty straightforward good vs. evil, picaresque adventure. We’re presented with an outsider hero – the aptly named “Bug” – and watch him grow into a revolutionary leader that commands the forces of the disenfranchised against the evil imperial armies.
Come on, this is Vollmann. There’s no way it would be that simple.
Bug’s story starts with his childhood in summer camp, where he experiences brutality towards himself and the insects at the hands of the other campers. This sequence lays the traumatic groundwork for Bug aligning himself with the plight of the insects. Vollmann realises that people aren’t created in a vacuum, and endeavours to create a fully realised portrait of a person who learns to ally himself with a subjugated class of people. Physical and psychological torment are the valence through which Bug’s worldview is coloured.
“As soon as the parents drove off, the new arrivals were surrounded by the boys and taken into the woods for assimilation. Soon there came terrible screams. But when they returned, now fast friends with their erstwhile tormentors, they grinned slyly. Never again would they be hurt.” – 153
This sequence is important for a number of reasons. It establishes an in-group out-group dichotomy that persists all throughout the novel, and it shows the brutality (unspoken as it may be) of what the dominant force will do to assimilate newcomers into their group. These summer camp cliques are the prototypes for the Reactionary Revolutionary divide that will form as these kids grow into adulthood. When it’s made clear that Bug won’t assimilate into the popular group, they torment him all summer long and into his adolescent years. What this trauma instils in Bug, is a violent, defensive scepticism of power and people.
“In truth, people were not so nice to Bug, which was why he became a murderer; for in later life he judged people too quickly and usually assigned them evil negative ratings, because most cases were ambiguous and he had been hurt so many times that he did not give ambiguous cases the benefit of the doubt; so he killed them.” – p. 173
His childhood of witnessing and experiencing dominant caste abuse fits a particular character archetype. This could’ve led to a simple story of ‘revolutionary triumph over the forces of tyranny’, but Vollmann complicates it by showing that for all his resistance, Bug has absorbed much of that fascist mindset unconsciously, and responds to his aggressors in the only way he’s been taught: through violence.
“When he saw how much power a little air and water could have, he decided to become a revolutionary. Riding the street cars in the morning, he took to musings not of what was under the skirts that pressed against him, but of maps, campaigns (skyscrapers and alleyways becoming for him mysterious and melancholy, like the forest at summer camp echoing with weird promises), the large cities ripe for terrorism and leadership…” – p. 195
Bug’s moral calculus is complicated even further as it’s slowly revealed that his interest in siding with the insects might not actually be out of any ideological support of their salvation, but simply because he wants to oppose those who persecuted him.
“All of his life, as we know it, Bug had been infected by a spasmodic political deviation from his peers.” - p. 266
The insects are resources to him; a means through which to achieve his goal of destroying the Reactionaries. This is pretty much how everyone treats one another in the book. How can they use each other to further their own individual goals? Vollmann alludes to this at the very beginning of the character list, by describing his characters with respect to who they are in service of. Here’s a description of one of my favourite characters:
“Frank Fairless: Double agent; darkroom technician, documentary slide show producer; loser; tool of Dr. Dodger and the blue globes; aged 48 in Y.R. 1. The reincarnation of Roger Garvey. At Bug’s disposal”. – p. x
Everyone is a tool of someone else, or at someone else’s disposal. This is effectively the bidirectional relationship between the insects and Bug. They’re simply using one another. Does Bug actually give a shit about them? We’re not given much to think so. When looking at a vulnerable insect, Bug remarks “he felt sorry for it, in the easy way that we all have pitying vulnerability when that pity costs us nothing” (p. 266). And when presented with the opportunity to save an insect from death at the hands of the other kids at summer camp, Bug stands by passively watching as they tear it limb from limb.
Bug’s alliance with the Insects is simply a pragmatic decision to help advance his own self-serving motivation: to wreak havoc on those who did so to him. The victim slowly, over the course of a long and discursive novel, becomes an aggressor himself. It’s an incredible ‘fuck you’ to the reader. We're primed to expected a classically picaresque redemption tale, but instead are given an agonising fall from grace. It beautiful and uncompromising in its exploration of indoctrination, dehumanisation, and cruelty at the service of ideology. Vollmann doesn’t take sides here; no one is safe from his moral scrutiny
Paging Dr Dodger
The conflicts present in the world of Angels are between the dichotomies of imperial expansion in the name of industry and indigenous resistance. All the characters that oppose each other in these various conflicts can be viewed as sort of… avatars of socioeconomic influences in the colonial machine. One of the most significant characters, both narratively and thematically, is the protean Dr. Dodger.
Here's his description from the Social Gazette of Personalities:
“Dr. Samuel William Dodger (a.k.a. Dr. William Samuel Dodger). Reactionary, inventor, lecturer, psychiatrist, small businessman (mail order and retail), senator, member ex-officio of all city councils in our great Republic; aged 79 in Y.R. 1. Mr. White’s righthand man. At Phil Baker’s disposal.” -p. iv.
Dr. Dodger is effectively the human embodiment of late-stage capitalism. The idea was conceived by Werner Sombart in the 20th Century, but it didn’t really take hold in the western world until the late 2010s (uncoincidentally, after the GFC). The term refers to the cultural attitudes toward the injustices, inequality, and exploitation that results from modern business development.
Pynchon [drink] addresses this idea head-on in Bleeding Edge when a character states that “late capitalism is a pyramid racket on a global scale… getting the suckers to believe it’s all gonna go on forever” (p. 163).
In recent years, there’s been a lot of pseudo-intellectual think pieces describing the ways in which the term has been mutated or co-opted to fit any situation that describes socioeconomic injustice. But remember, this was written in ’87 before the term came into vogue. Vollmann’s just had his finger on the pulse of American life since the get-go. Like his contemporaries, he’s something of a cultural anthropologist in the way he uses character archetypes to describe cultural phenomena. Dodger is the perfect distillation of market violence left to grow, perverting the economic system present in the book.
Dodger, who operates as Mr. White’s righthand man, is a protean jack-of-all-trades, intent on commodifying anything that can possibly have a dollar value attached to it. All throughout the book, we see the ways in which he positions himself as an inventor, strategist, lobbyist, and general ‘ideas man’ for the Reactionary elite.
“Doctor Dodger had long since realised that the more inventions he produced and town councils he sat on and patients he treated and students he taught and businesses he ran the less accountable he was because it was very hard to keep up with him and he could always argue that what was bad for one enterprise was good for another, in such a way to improve the whole by some fractional amount.” – p. 409
One of his key industrial projects is a darkroom photo lab, described as “the center of a technical revolution, it’s business procedures reflect[ing] the impact of industrial capitalism” (p. 324). Many of the key players on the Reactionary side are employed in this lab, which acts as the catalyst to a large portion of the conflict in the last act of the book.
Yet for all his alleged industriousness, Dodger churns out new products at the expense of longevity or quality. If this idea isn’t familiar to you, then you’ve clearly never bought one of these little bastards:
“Dr. Dodger’s inventions are for short-term emergency use only, soon outworn by new frenetic capitalist innovations or the sullen tide of free market goods, and besides they bust pretty easy […]. The structures built by Dr. Dodger were really so much shabby cardboard, designed to give a tolerable illusion of solidity, like the painted backdrop to a theatrical performance, but they existed mainly because the audience paid to see the play.” – p. 407/8
I talked at reasonable length about “the decayed state of capitalism” in the previous episode on Animal Money, which is a perspective that I appear to share with Vollmann himself. When interviewed about his 2009 mammoth Imperial, he went on record to describe “the disease of capitalism” as the primary force that drove Imperial County into destitution, as well as fuel his desire to write about it… for 1300 pages.
Again, that was 2009, but this was 1987. What we can glean here is that this idea has tracked consistently through his entire body of work. He shares that with the likes of Cisco, Delillo, Pynchon [drink], Gaddis, and so on. Vollmann’s had his sights set on the economic exploitation of the lower class since his debut novel.
“Nothing which he had a hand in ever went wrong as long as was present at the demo show, for it was after the product had been sold and field-tested once and Dr. Dodger had been relieved of all liability that bad things began to happen.” – p. 409
Ever had an appliance die on you just after the two-year warranty timed out? Yeah, me too. Pre-emptive obsolesce might have just been a fancy set of words in the 80s but I assure you it’s alive and well today.
This idea is drawn further to a more insidious end when we see the role Dodger plays in the treatment of the insects that are captured by the Reactionaries. These prisoners of war are sentenced to death by hanging, in specially designed gallows patented by (you guessed it) Dr. Dodger. Vollmann, having the truly twisted sense of humour he does, plays this scene for laughs when the gallows ultimately malfunction horribly, and the Reactionaries end up shooting the insect to death. That’s a Dodger product for you. It’s awful and harrowing but also just goes to show the absurd and ridiculous lengths capitalism will go when left to operate unchecked.
Anything that can be packaged, marketed, and sold has Dodger’s brand stamped across it, in true free-market fashion. He will produce anything for you provided the money’s right, regardless of the moral or human cost. This is in part why the Reactionaries yield so much power. They know exactly how to commodify themselves. Dodger is the lens through which to view this reading of the book. When parsing through it yourself, I’d encourage you to keep our modern-day analogues – Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and so on – in mind while reading Dodger’s scenes. You’ll be confronted with how prescient this messaging is today.
Cowboys and Indians
I’ve given a lot of airtime to the characters, conceit, structure and so on with the book, but we haven’t really gotten to what You Bright and Risen Angels is actually about; what Vollmann set out to do with this story. Of course, as an outsider looking in, I can only speculate on something as intimate as authorial intent, but if no one else is going to stick their neck out there and try to deconstruct Vollman (save the few I’ve already mentioned), then I’m gonna give it the old college try, as it were.
I’ve mentioned already that it doesn’t take a shrewd literary scholar to see this novel for what it is: a postcolonial allegory. If you take into account Vollmann’s experiences with the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan only a few years earlier, it becomes explicitly apparent that this preoccupation with power and persecution was informed by his experiences as a journalist in the region at that time, as well as his feeling of helplessness to affect it any which way:
“By the time I finished writing the first version of An Afghanistan Picture Show, many more people in Afghanistan had been killed. I wanted to right the balance on paper (since I was impotent to do so anywhere else) by telling a story about a good extremist who triumphed over the bad guys… I made the bad guys as bad as I possibly could, and I made them oppress Bug himself so that he would be unequivocally in the right. But as soon as Bug began to strike back, he began to become evil, no matter what I did.” – Biographical Statement, 1989.
There’s one reading you can take away from this statement. Perhaps the concept of Big George’s narratorial omnipotence was the result of Vollmann’s multiple attempts and ultimate failure to give Bug a conclusion of righteous salvation. It’s almost like Vollmann had a Big George of his own, steering him away from the easy happy ending in favour of a cynical and misanthropic outcome. I don’t necessarily use those terms disparagingly. Vollmann was simply interested in communicating a worldview that he had witnessed first hand, and as a journalist and historian.
In an interview with Michael Silverblat on Bookworm, he says “the material residue of human history is bloodstains”. I’m venturing into reductive territory here, but I’ll be the first to say that history - particularly European colonial history - can be neatly boiled down to a clash of opposing ideologies that has almost always resolved itself through violence. What we see with Angels, is his supposed hero, Bug, believes a violent means can be justified by an ideological end.
Does Vollmann believe that? For my money, nada.
The essay I found most broadly instructive with respect to the thematic intention underlying Angels, was Miles Liebtag’s essay “Our Oriental Heritage: Seeking the Postcolonial Postmodern in You Bright and Risen Angels”.
This essay is included in the William T Vollmann Critical Companion, compiled by Christopher Coffmann & Daniel Lukes. As a Vollmann neophyte, I wasn’t quite prepared to shell out the $150 for a print copy of this companion, so I went with the much more affordable eBook for the time being. I’ve gotta say, after reading this essay closely and browsing through the other critical works in here, I’m strongly considering buying the print edition after all. I would call this the most indispensable readers guide since Weisenberger’s Gravity’s Rainbow Companion [drink] or Steven Moore’s Gaddis annotations. Jordan Rothacker, one of the hosts of the Vollmannia podcast I mentioned earlier, also penned the essay “Piss Lime Vitriol” included in the book.
In his essay, Liebtag sets out to both defend Angels from its status as a “lesser work” in Vollmann’s catalogue, and position it as an exceptional satire of manifest destiny. Both Liebtag and I agree, the easy reading of this novel, would be to view it as a simple ‘assimilation and resistance’ story: Good vs. Evil; Reactionary and Revolutionary; Cowboys and Indians.
My reading is that Vollmann’s sympathies don’t lie exclusively with the Revolutionaries. It’s just not the sort of novel you can cleanly compartmentalize (Reactionaries - Bad, Revolutionaries - Good). What Angels is in reality, is a cautionary tale of the ways in which dogmatism can corrupt a well-meaning resistance effort.
“Angels presents a valuable critique of dehumanizing ideologies, and rejects the moral absolution of those ideologies on the grounds that they can be turned toward the ends of resistance or revolution. Far from being relativistic, Angels forces moral confrontations on all fronts, and finds innocence only momentarily and contingently: “Voltage which may be harmless one day may be fatal the next, if atmospheric conditions are right.” Context being everything, the novel says, we believe in undifferentiated cruelty to the hazard of our antic souls; material circumstances matter, but so does empathy with the disenfranchised, the marginal, and the subaltern.”
– Miles Liebtag, Our Oriental Heritage
Look, it might initially appear that Vollmann has sided with Bug (his supposed “hero”) and the Revolutionaries, but if you adopt Liebtag’s critical valence, you end up seeing him (Vollmann) as rejecting both groups. Because they each have their own individual dehumanising ideologies towards the insects; just packaged a little differently. The Reactionaries enslave, torture, and kill them, while Bug simply uses them to achieve his own violent goals, regardless of the cost of life to them personally. They are tools for him to wield in the pursuit of his dogmatic goal. In the end, it almost plays out as “Everyone vs. the Insects”. If the marginal and the oppressed are the objects of Vollmann’s empathy, then one could make the reasonable claim that the insects are where his interests lie.
This preoccupation with expansionist oppression could be viewed as a prototype for what he would explore at length in his Seven Dreams series. To those unfamiliar, the Seven Dreams are a series of historical novels focussing on the violent conflicts between European settlers and the indigenous peoples of North America. He views these conflicts through the examination of landscape, and the ways in which the natural world is altered, excavated and transformed with the proliferation of settlers and industry. Years before the first Dream (The Ice Shirt), we see him workshopping these ideas in Angels. The first hundred and thirty pages of the book are devoted to a sort of oral history of electricity. Vollmann presents a vision of an untouched, indigenous American west, before the widespread dissemination of electricity, where the landscape was uncorrupted by industry.
“Nowadays, as one lounges out on the porch of an evening, in a folding lawn chair of finished redwood, it is scarcely possible to recall the limitations of those days. It seems that our memory typewriters and compact disk players have been around forever, like wise infinitely reliable mentors and administrators of our sport.” – p. 34
Here, we see Big George reclining on a redwood chair cut from the landscape, musing to himself that all memory of the precolonial world has ceased to exist. Contemporary American society has been fed a myth that the landscape was a wild, uninhabited world before European settlement, which is just categorically false. It’s part of the historical rhetoric that’s written and modified time and time again as if you’re part of a program that Big George had a hand in corrupting. Big George, pure electrical consciousness itself, could be read as the physical manifestation of colonial rhetoric, erasing, altering, and manipulating our cultural memory - our program - from the moment it started being written.
You take for granted as you read this, that the fibre-optical cabling that runs from YouTubes data servers to your laptop weren’t always there. Those wires were laid down at the expense of the natural landscape and the forcible removal of people who were indigenous to the region. Or if you want to do away with the landscape-indigenous allegory altogether, then you could simply view the Insects as obstacles in the way of the author’s program running smoothly – “a bug in the code”, if you will. Coincidental pun? I call bullshit.
In Angels, Electricity is the force that’s always placed in the relative position of power. Not the reactionaries, but electricity itself, and the Blue Globes that produce and control it. The Globes allow themselves to be used by the Reactionaries because their willful servitude provides them with the opportunity to multiple and metastasize over the American landscape. How much clearer of an allegory do you need? The end-goal of European imperialism has, and always will be, manifest destiny.
“The electricity was something quite other, and it was up to no good, so that as we constructed our grids and boosting stations and lines across the entire world, we increased its mobility and power; and someday perhaps a hundred years from now […], when everything was electrified, then we would see the true face…” – p. 65
In my reading, that ‘face’ is not just the global electrification that’s contributing to our dying planet today, but also the ways in which that power is commodified. Vollmann illustrates for us, in no uncertain terms, the horrific lengths colonialism will go to serve a capitalistic outcome. A perfect example is the hundreds of thousands of ants that are boiled down to Dodger’s photo lab to produce toner for the printers, so they can distribute Reactionary propaganda.
“In those days the photo lab was the center of a technical revolution. Its business procedures reflected the impact of industrial capitalism upon the Oriental feudal enlargers. Into the negative tanks strode a grim new breed, the mentality of which had been developed with the help of Dr. Dodger's capital. They knew the decimal value of manganese ore. Meanwhile the desks of the back room secretaries, which had once resembled a noisy Asiatic bazaar in their show of print dresses and lipstick, the swapping of aspirin for cold sore pills, the exotic clickings of high-heeled shoes on the cement floor (which was stained with the formic acid of hundreds of thousands of ants who had been boiled alive as prisoners of war to make sepia toner-” – p. 345
Mr. White proliferates the electrification of America, and Dodger commodifies it. Capitalism and colonialism collide, all at the expense of the marginal and the oppressed. I mean seriously, do you need it made any clearer? His company is literally called ‘White Power”. Vollmann’s pretty much spoon-feeding the metaphor to you.
Everyone in the novel, at nearly every narrative level, is complicit in imperial aggression. Vollmann clarifies this idea by revealing at the very end, that the place from which the author is writing the program... is inside the offices of the Society of Daniel, the headquarters for the Reactionary movement. We see that Big George has locked the author into the abandoned offices and now he's left to write his story alone in the dark after the janitors have gone home.
“We bright and risen angels are all in our graves, as I, the author, can assure you; for Big George has locked me into the Society of Daniel for the sake of productivity” – p. 632
Instantaneously, Vollmann collapses the framing device into the nested cartoon, even converging his own story of how he wrote the novel, all into a single narrative space. All this time we've been led to believe that the author is fatalistically watching the cartoon from above, as these little Sim-like characters run wild in his digital dollhouse (“’You’ Bright and Risen Angels”). But in this moment, the author, Big George, Bug, Mr White, Dr Dodger, and possibly even Vollmann himself all find themselves situated in his surreal reimagining of an electrified America, together. This Wild Wild West bell jar now places every character in the book on a level playing field, implicating them all in the colonisation allegory (“’We’ Bright and Risen Angels”).
Call it what you want - simulation, program, cartoon, ethical laboratory - what I see, is a biting societal critique that has no hesitation against shining its accusatory lens on itself. An author willing to show teeth. You’ve gotta respect that. How did so many critics miss this? No one escapes this story without some degree of complicity, and Vollmann leaves the narrative open-ended to show us that imperialism and colonial aggression are still an ongoing project, yet to be rectified; a story with plenty of pages left to be written.
There are a number of ways you could interpret it, but I see this as the reason why the novel is intentionally unfinished. We saw this at the beginning with the “Transcendental Table of Contents”, which shows that the novel ends less than halfway through its story. We don’t get any clear conclusion at the end of the book, only two conflicting promises of what will happen. One from the author… and one from Big George.
I know there will be those who'll disagree with me... but I wish we could've seen those unwritten chapters come to life. Seriously, just look at a few of these chapter titles
“Terror in Florida”, “Mating with the Great Beetle”, “The Exodus to Greenland”, “The Alabama Offensive”, “In the Mausoleum”, “The Fulfilment of All Intentions”
There is so much incredible potential in this story, and I would've loved to see him take it even further. It's not often that I say that a 600-page novel, with this level of typeset density, doesn't feel long enough.
But I understand and respect his decision to leave it open to possibility. Imperial expansion is far from complete, both in the book and the world in which its been read.
This gets to the heart of why I find Vollmann so goddamn fascinating. He can blend history, contemporary life, speculation, and fantastic absurdity, combine it all together, and still come out with a cohesive story. In doing so, he forces you to examine your own relationship with the constructed reality you live in. It's not your fault we live in a colonial world, but it's damn sure your responsibility to take part in its correction.
So long as there's an "us" and a "them"... whether it be Europeans or Indigenous, Democrats or Republicans, even Humans and Insects, we can't say in good conscience that we live in a "post-colonial" world.
A Response to the Critics
Among the small but devoted swathe of Vollmann readers, Angels is considered something of an outlier. I’m not particularly well-positioned to weigh in on this, as I’ve only read one other book by him at this point, The Atlas, which I’ve been reading alongside Angels.
People have referred to Angels as the “ugly duckling” of his catalogue. While I think that’s an unfair characterisation, I do recognise the distance between his debut and the rest of his work. At the risk of sounding reductive, The Atlas could almost be seen as a sort of… reader’s digest of his writing. It contains early versions and excerpts that would be expanded into other full-length books including Butterfly Stories, The Rifles, Fathers and Crows, even parts of Angels itself. I’ve also started chipping away at Fathers and Crows as my first foray into the Seven Dreams. So, of the bits and pieces I have read so far, I see a much more grounded, subdued style in his later work when compared to the hysterical realism that you’ll find in Angels. Maximalism and absurdity are clearly present here, and I think that calls for a particular literary sensibility. For that reason, I’m not entirely surprised readers of more conventional fiction bristled at its histrionics. But I’d like to offer some brief counter-arguments to a few of the claims made against it.
“Vollmann has the ambition and imagination to fuel a metafictional army, but his overwriting--often cryptic and dense with tumbling 200-word sentences--leads the unwieldy enterprise into a swamp from which it never escapes.” – Kirkus Reviews, 1987
I normally like Kirkus but this just didn’t ring true to me. I think it’s interesting that the author here refers to it as “a swamp from which it never escapes”. That reads to me like the words of someone who wanted a clear-cut sense of closure, dispassionate towards whoever is the one to receive it. Reactionaries… revolutionaries… it doesn’t matter, he just wanted Vollmann to put a pin in the whole thing. What I think is they should have at least humoured the possibility that the novel’s open ending was meant to depict the unfinished state of our postcolonial existence. People have said Angels starts to fall apart in the second half but that just wasn’t my experience at all. He opens this world up wider and wider as he goes along, showing the reader exactly how far the influences of imperial oppression stretch; a continent of expansionist control. He doesn’t tie it up neatly in the bow at the end, but forces a participatory reading experience where you have to do some heavy inferential lifting yourself to determine how this story ended. I don’t remember anyone decrying Infinite Jest for doing the exact same thing, so why take issue here?
Here’s another from an acquaintance of mine:
“Reading [the book’s] description would have made me excited to read this novel. But it seems that these events are rarely focused on or are touched on in such obtuse ways that I rarely understood the purpose of what I was reading. The cartoonish nature leaves every characters one-sided and did not allow me to engage in any form of empathy or compassion” – WatchReadGame Review, 2021
This one is from Byron’s Glowing Filament on Twitter [@WatchReadGame], someone whose feed I really enjoy. They make a lot of good points in the review, but this one I wanted to push back on a bit.
I see this particular criticism of character lobbed at Pynchon [drink] quite often. While not entirely ungrounded, I suppose your reading of their characters will be filtered through a particular set of expectations. If you’re coming into Angels or Gravity’s Rainbow [drink] with the expectation of a stunningly vivid study of individual character psychology and interior life, you’re going to have those expectations crushed in the first fifty pages; It’s just not that kind of book. On the flip side, if your interest is in a ‘systems novel’, that examines the sociological, economic, and political power structures and their interplay across broader society, then this is exactly what you’re in for. Both Vollmann and Pynchon focalise these concepts through the medium of character, and that can often be what gives their characters a stilted feeling of one-sidedness. Let me call back to Miles Liebtag’s essay from the Vollmann Companion:
“Structural forces of late capitalism and its counter-movements, represented by symbolic aggregates like the all-powerful “blue globes” and the seemingly omniscient “Great Beetle,” interpellate and position agents according to each of their own needs, giving no ultimate preference to even such a remarkable agent as [Thomas] Edison, knowing that to do so ‘would’ve been contrary to the laws of social development.’ Characters in You Bright and Risen Angels are typically avatars of market violence.”
– Miles Liebtag, Our Oriental Heritage
He said it better than I ever could. The characters in Angels may come off as exaggerated or caricatured, but that’s because they function as a commentary on particular belief systems, acting as microcosms of broader societal attitudes. Mr White exemplifies far-right fascist conservativism, Dodger embodies free-market capitalism run amok, and Bug is a distillation of a marginalised victimhood complex turned violent. They’re representations of a larger reality, which Vollmann hyper-saturates to histrionic effect. It’s hysterical realism 101. Sure, he beats you over the head with his themes from time to time, but it’s exactly what he promised from the epigraph:
“Only the expert will realize that your exaggerations are really true”. Plus, the novel is literally subtitled: a cartoon.
How about this one:
“When I tried to express my frustration to a classmate, saying that [Vollmann] seemed more interested in performing than getting his ideas across, and that if he wanted to perform, why not go into show business […], she countered that I might be drawing a line between ‘performance’ and ‘theory’ that she felt was unnecessary.” – Gordseller Review, 2013
I like this one because he includes the counterargument himself. How kind of him to do my work for me. I am a staunch believer in the idea that history is nothing more than a subjective construction, fed to you through the filter of political and ideological rhetoric. You’d have to be incredibly naïve to think that politics is somehow divorced from performance, and Angels is a profoundly political novel. It’s not Vollmann’s politics on display, but a melting pot of clashing dogmas, ranging from fascism to pacifism. Sure, the plot is wildly outlandish and absurd, but that’s just following in the footsteps of the satirists that preceded him: Gaddis, Delillo, Pynchon [drink] and so on. They take touchstones of cultural and sociological relevance and crank the volume up. Personally? I’ve got all the time in the world for wild, surreal maximalism, provided it has something to say. Performance is just what makes the theory actually fun to read.
Look, Angels has been accused of being a lot of different things: Masturbatory, overwritten, sloppy, boring, digressive, and nonsensical. While I see the place that all these criticisms come from, I urge anyone who gave up partway through or got bored and started skimming to stop, start over, and read it slowly. For my money, I think this is a brilliant first work of fiction, filled with remarkable prose, and makes some incredibly thought-provoking arguments about colonialism and the limits of resistance. So, if you’re thinking about returning to it or starting for the first time, let me offer a few recommendations.
Recommendations
You Bright and Risen Angels is a novel written for a very particular type of reader, with a clear set of expectations, from the beginning. Here is my model of that reader:
You should already have a pre-established taste for absurdity and should be reasonably comfortable with the conventions of the hysterical realism genre.
If you haven’t read at least a few of the authors I’ve referenced in relation to Vollmann, you’d be doing yourself a favour by doing so.
You need to have both a liking for maximalism and a high tolerance for digression, as this is a very discursive novel. Vollmann will wander off from the main narrative for up to fifty pages at a time with scenes and vignettes that add depth and texture to his world… but may leave you scratching your head as to their direct narrative relevance.
And above all that, you need to have a stomach for violence and abuse, as it’s depicted in grim detail here.
I absolutely recommend Miles Liebtag’s essay which I referenced in a previous section, as he makes an incredibly compelling case for the novel as a postcolonial allegory. The Vollmann Companion is a pricey book in print format, but the digital copy is much more affordable and will prove to be an indelible resource as you continue through Vollmann’s work. I’d encourage you to give Chris Via’s video a peek, as he gives a much more concise breakdown of the book which may be better suited to a new reader. My episode is intended more for people who’ve already read it and want a deep-dive analysis of it.
I’d also recommend tabbing the Personality Gazette, Synthetic Cognitions a Priori, and Station Identification chapters for reference as you move through the book, as I found having them readily at hand to be really quite helpful.
While I can see both sides of the argument, I think there is a strong case to be made for Angels as a starting point if you’re new to Vollmann. No, I don’t think it’s broadly representative of the rest of his work when it comes to prose styling, structure, or tone. However, the concepts he’s exploring with this debut would lay the groundwork for a set of thematic and cultural concerns that would track through his entire career. Marginal oppression, the fallibility of resistance, the risks of ideology, capitalism as a corrupting force – all the pieces of his entire thematic oeuvre are here and having this as a primer to contextualise everything that follows really appeals to me. While it may be far from perfect, You Bright and Risen Angels is an incredible novel and provides, in my mind, an excellent entry point to a long and deeply impactful literary career.
It may have been my first Vollmann, but I guarantee you it will not be my last.
End Notes
Another episode done and dusted. This one was a long one, so gold star to you if you’re still reading. You have the attention span worthy of a Vollmann novel. Despite what the linear increase in episode length over the last three videos may lead you to believe, it is not the intention for these to get progressively longer each time. I just had a lot to say about this one, as did everyone else I referenced here. If you want to read up on any of the secondary resources I included in this episode, I’ve included links all throughout. As I mentioned up top, you can also find audio versions of today’s episode linked here. I’m eager for any feedback, both critical and complimentary so please don’t hesitate to drop me a line in the comments or the inbox – always happy to hear from you.
I think that’s everything. See you next month, Paranoids.
…Holy shit. Did you know Vollmann was on the FBI’s suspect list for the Unabomber? And then after they cleared his name, he was also suspected of being the Anthrax Mailer. You can’t make this shit up!
God… only Vollmann.
The Vollmann crash course I’ve been waiting for! Thanks for this.