"One Must Do Abnormal Things"The whole of Vollmann’s novel is conveyed by an omniscient narrator. It’s tempting to assume that it’s Vollmann himself. However, as usual that would probably be a mistake, even if we learn a lot about the author by what he writes in the guise of others.The key protagonist is a male American, known variously as the butterfly boy, the journalist, the husband and Vanna’s husband.These guises or masks represent different stages in the unnamed protagonist’s life. Vollmann presents them almost like short stories, but together they constitute a legitimate novel.For almost half of the narrative, the journalist is accompanied by a double, the photographer, on an Asian assignment for a glossy magazine (presumably Esquire). One is responsible for the words, the other the pictures. They complement each other. They’re a team. However, the assignment is a ruse to whore their way around Asia and document it for payment. Of the two, the photographer is the more vainglorious, the journalist the more sensitive. Together, they’re just as bad as each other.Perhaps, I shouldn’t use the word "bad". Vollmann asks us to leave morality and all concepts of Good and Evil behind when we open the book. It’s good advice. This is not a morality tale, it’s not a moral calculus. It’s about men fucking women with whom they share only enough words of either language to negotiate a sexual transaction. Despite the title of Vollmann's "Prostitution Trilogy", it's not so much about the abstract of prostitution as the concrete of what men do to prostitutes.Still, it’s a Bildungsroman of sorts. It’s about the getting of wisdom, even if the journalist seems to make no progress over the course of the novel:"He remembered again what the Inuit had always said, that to gain more wisdom than others one must do abnormal things. The Inuit had done it by going off into the ice alone until animal spirits came. The husband would do it through promiscuity."Flings like a Butterfly, Stings like a BeeFor all of its metaphysical concerns (which can be inferred from the eminently brainy epigraphs at the head of each story), the style of the novel is more realistic than Post-Modern.But for its sexual subject matter, the language is fairly pedestrian, almost nondescript and utilitarian.The structure of the novel and the emphasis on the time in Asia does, however, tend to disguise the fact that the two protagonists were only in Asia for about two weeks. They got to know about a dozen whores each. Like all male western sex tourists (or "falangs"), they were regarded as butterflies, because of their tendency to flutter from one woman to another without commitment. This novel, then, is the monarch of butterfly stories.Both protagonists were already married back in America. Both believed that they fell in love with at least one of their whores (Vanna in the case of the journalist, and Joy in the case of the photographer). The photographer, despite (or perhaps because of) his general lechery, had the good sense to realise it was a holiday infatuation. The journalist was never able to adjust. On his return, he decided to divorce his wife of 11 years, without necessarily knowing whether he would ever see Vanna again.What We Talk about When We Talk about LoveThere is much talk about love in the novel. The whores use the term almost as an inducement to another night in the sack, i.e., another payment. For all of their abject poverty, they are the most realistic about the personal and economic situation.They reassure the journalist that, in finding Vanna, he has not necessarily found love. He has only “found a hole; he knew from the Pat Pong girls that there’d always be a hole if he wanted one badly enough.”The journalist kids himself that he's in love. But what is love? What is the difference between love and filling a hole? Does love just fill a hole?"And what was she to him? She said she loved him, and he did believe that if he asked her to marry him she would do it, come with him, bring her child (her other husband had kicked her in the face and abandoned her), and he thought that she must love him as she understood love, and he loved her as he understood love; was that enough?"He summarises his predicament to a friend:"I’m thinking of leaving my wife and marrying an illiterate prostitute from Cambodia whose language I can’t speak a word of."Still, Vanna is not without her appeal. Here is a physical description of her:"She was so slender, like a thin hymen of flesh stretched over bones; he could feel her every rib under his palm. Her long brown nipples did not excite him, but enriched his tenderness."Love and LonelinessThis is about as lyrical as Vollmann gets in this tale, apart from describing the journalist’s love and (the hole of his own) loneliness:"He was so lonely among them that he wanted to love any and all of them even though loving any of them would only make him more lonely because loving them wasn’t really loving them…"Still, he leaves a special place for Vanna, at least in his mind. She is different from any other wife or whore, even though he plans to make a wife of her:"…the similarity between whores and wives is that you don’t have to consider their pleasure when you fuck them, unlike sweethearts such as Vanna (who probably don’t enjoy it either)."Even as he contemplates the implications of what he has done, he justifies his butterfly activities:"There was nothing wrong with sleeping around if you loved everybody; you could be faithful to a hundred wives…The husband loved Vanna the best. He’d keep being promiscuous only until he had her forever. Then he wouldn’t need anyone but her. And if it turned out then that he was still unfaithful after all, surely a whore would be used to it."Ironically, some of Vollmann’s best writing is reserved for a whore the journalist meets after Vanna:"Lying in bed with Noi, the light still on, the butterfly fluttered excitedly knowing that Noi’s vulva was going to open up for him like one of those Ayutthaya-style gilded lacquer book cabinets: gold leaves and birds and leaf-flames on black…He saw himself, though, as some old white palace with gilded lacquer doorways and windows, the courtyard still and green…Inside him there was definitely room for Noi. Inside Noi there was room for him."Longing for a New WifeThere’s no need for me to colour this writing with any insinuation of (im)morality or self-indulgence. You can infer that for yourself, if you so desire. Hopefully, I have represented the concerns of the novel accurately enough to let you judge whether it might be your thing.Still, at a more philosophical level, I think it’s a bit much to suggest that the journalist forms any relationships that embody any Hegelian mutual recognition or Heideggerian Mitsein. Rather, the novel seems to describe the perils of contemporary western narcissism, if not necessarily wholesale solipsism.The journalist is in a prison of his own making. Now, finally, he can understand de Sade’s prison scribblings:"…the sex object no longer mattered; an old man was as good as a young girl; there was always a hole somewhere; but unlike de Sade he didn’t want to hurt anyone, really didn’t; didn’t even want to fuck anyone anymore particularly; it was just that he was so lost like a drifting spaceman…"This is a novel about longing, about a quest for "Love, I guess. A new wife." The journalist recognises several times that he is lost. He has lost his religion. Yet, somehow he believes that he is not lost at all. He still has his new wife, Vanna, the wife he can experience only in his mind, even if she too can be supplanted by the next tight cunt he encounters:"What he was doing was systematically dismantling his own reality, blurring faces and names (sometimes he couldn’t remember the name of the woman he was on top of; of course she couldn’t remember his, either), forming mutually exclusive attachments that left him a liar and a cheat attached to no one, passing his own reckoning by."Even if this might be grist for an edgy new fiction mill, surely it's not the way to find a new wife or a new life?WE CALL UPON THE AUTHOR TO EXPLAIN:Paris Review Interview (What I Would Do For My Art)INTERVIEWER (Madison Smartt Bell):It’s clear that parts of Butterfly Stories have to be fictional, but still I wonder, did you have unprotected sex with that many prostitutes? Why take those risks?VOLLMANNWell, I wouldn’t mind finding some other way. When I was writing Angels, Rainbow Stories, and the other stories, that sort of thing wasn’t particularly interesting to me—getting involved with all the prostitutes that way. But I kept thinking when I first began writing that my female characters were very weak and unconvincing. What is the best way to really improve that? I thought, Well, the best way is to have relationships with a lot of different women. What’s the best way to do that? It’s to pick up whores.INTERVIEWERHas this worked?VOLLMANNI don’t know, but I feel that I have created some really good characters. Also, I often feel lonely. It’s been really nice for me to have all of these women who really, I truly believe, care about me. I care about them. I keep in touch with them. I help them out, they help me out; they pay my rent because I can write about them. I do pictures of them, I give them pictures; I paint them myself. It works pretty well.INTERVIEWERIt seems to me you’d learn a whole lot about how prostitutes think and are, and not necessarily that much about more conventional women.VOLLMANNRight. Well, I have been able to sleep around with some of them too.INTERVIEWERWell, good. I’m glad to hear that.VOLLMANNI almost never sleep with American prostitutes any more, unless they really want me to—if they are going to get hurt if I don’t. I have a lot of them as friends. They pose for me as models, and I have written a lot of stories about them....INTERVIEWER:There are some other writers who do make an issue of their personalities in their work in one way or another—Norman Mailer, in certain phases of his career, or Hunter Thompson or Charles Bukowski, whose material is similar to what’s in The Rainbow Stories. But that style of self-presentation is often about vanity. I was wondering how you felt about this. Are you aware that people are watching? Do you care? Do you think that no one’s watching?VOLLMANN:I figure some people are watching, but I really don’t care what anybody thinks. All I want to do is be able to have my freedom and do the things in life that I have always wanted to do. I want to see all of these unknown places, walk on the frozen sea as often as I can, and see the jungles. I want to fall in love with beautiful women of all races. Rescue somebody every now and then, improve my painting, and improve my sentence structure. If I can make a living doing that stuff, that’s great, and I will keep doing it, and they can do whatever they want with my image. I couldn’t care less.http://www.theparisreview.org/intervi...BESIDES AND RARITIES:Divine Revelation a la Sade et GenetWhat I write isNinety percentMasturbationAnd ten percentInspiration.Hello, Tiny Madam[Inspired by Robyn Hitchcock]Now we've got our K-Y JellyAnd some porn on the telly,Will you lick the royal jellyThat you've drizzled on my belly?Waiting for Our Bill to Comeby Vladimir JackoffalotWe came in off the streetFor the best steak in town.The neon sign, it said,"You can't beat our meat."Upstairs, Vanna disagrees.She gladly lends a hand.She'll even share dessert.She's not one to displease.Obsessed with tender loins,But way down on his luck,The writer can't affordA blowjob or a fuck.We spot him all our notes,Two hundred dollars plus,For a tip, these coins.Let's hope he gets some quotes.Now he's down on his kneesBegging her just to please,Let him get a close-up,So he can write it up.Ninety minutes later,We're still here, waitingFor our bill to come,With the female waiter.The Blue BoyThe blue boy moved to a new school on the outskirts of the city midway through grade two. He can remember arriving early and sitting down in the sandpit near the oval, where pretty soon he was joined by a girl with long, straight hair called Karen. They became friends. They even talked about each other as boy- and girlfriend by the end of the week. On that first day, Karen introduced the blue boy to everybody else in their class, and he quickly found a place in the pecking order. There was another boy whose name he can't remember now. Let's call him Martin. His family came from somewhere in England. Martin was the first person he'd known who really liked Alice Cooper. The blue boy was really into David Bowie, but in those days Alice Cooper was pretty cool too. They became friends, too, though not as close as Karen. One day, Martin's father walked to school with him. His hands were shaking and his eyes looked like he had been crying. He hugged Martin and said goodbye. When he'd gone, the blue boy asked Martin what was wrong. He said his dad had been in the war. The blue boy thought he meant the second world war, but he was talking about some war that had just been on in Malaya. "Wow, what did he do? Did he shoot anyone?" Martin looked hesitant, then decided to answer, "I suppose so, but not with bullets. He was a photographer." The blue boy wasn't sure what this involved: "What did he photograph?" Martin's eyes lit up in pride: "Dead bodies." It turned out that Martin's father had kept a stash of black and white photos of dead Communist insurgents. Martin agreed to bring them along to school later that week. The blue boy flicked through them anxiously. Their purpose had been to identify exactly how each insurgent had died. They were graphic portraits of horrific injuries. Close up shots of skulls half-blown away with the eyes still open. Open chests exploded as if from inside, broken ribs jutting out while supporting bloody mangled internal organs that had long ceased to function. The blue boy kept reacting, "Oh, yuck." He had thought he could handle something like this, but after a while he had to stop looking. He could understand why Martin's father still shook. He had started to shake himself.SOUNDTRACK:Robyn Hitchcock - "The Afterlight"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tY93a...[Track actually ends at 3:47]"The Monarch is a butterfly who’s built the same as you and IHe wears blue jeans with a wine bellyHe’s secreting royal jellyWhich his consort loves to cookAnd then they peer in the cooking book...Hello tiny madam, can I comfort you tonightWith the tiny world so brightHello tiny madam, can I comfort you tonightWhen the priest has gone? Oh, right!"Robyn Hitchcock - "You've Got a Sweet Mouth on You Baby"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nxsi3...Robyn Hitchcock - "Sounds Great When You're Dead"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL3S1..."Your mother is a journalist, your father is a creepThey make it in your bedroom when they think you're fast asleepThe scenes that they're enacting now beside your little bedAre never in your consciousness but always in your head...He lives and breathes on systems that nobody can supplyAnd you're immune to everything except the butterfly."(view spoiler)[Drawing of nameless Asian girl (let's pretend it's Vanna) with Marlboro and "WTV" love heart tattoo found on inside back cover of my second hand copy of the novel. (hide spoiler)]
My roommate, who was a much better teen than I was, read this when she was seventeen and mainly determined what to read by how disturbing it sounded. She recalls this novel as "adequately disturbing". I didn't exactly find it disturbing, despite its greatest part being an account of sex tourism in Vietnam and Cambodia. Rather, I felt pulled along its trajectory from pathetic and sad to pathetic and vaguely cathartic. The protagonist, who despite being described in third person (and often with the narrator's approbation) I could not help but see as somewhat autobiographical, is a journalist who spends much of his time in southeast Asia falling rapidly in love with prostitutes. It's unclear why exactly he is predisposed to this despite the introductory sections of the book, offering glimpses of his formative experience, but he seems predisposed to falling in love with almost anyone, and perhaps prostitutes have that additional draw of (seeming to him to) need someone to fall in love with them. But as the more overtly chauvinist photographer who accompanies him observes, in the end there really is not that much difference between fucking prostitutes out of a desire to save them and fucking them out of a desire to fuck them. Why these two men are on a sex tour of southeast Asia isn't really all that obvious since their actions mostly fail to reflect any real purpose, but it seems likely they were to follow the political situation in Cambodia. And it is in the creeping references to this (everyone bears scars of, or lost friends and family to, the brutal Khmer Rouge) that give the narrative a deeper resonance, whatever the preoccupations of its characters. Later, back in the states, the journalist cannot leave behind these experiences and the two threads seem inextricably intertwined in them.Overall, Vollmann's often pared-down style and content come off like a more self-conscious (sometimes annoyingly so) Bukowski, punctuated by stretches of lyricism, narrative experiment, and a grasping at significance. I enjoyed it enough that I picked up a more ambitious selection on my next Strand trip, his massive Europe Central.
What do You think about Butterfly Stories (1994)?
Vollmann continually floors me with his writing. His ability in conveying human interaction regardless of a character's motives is one of his finer attributes. He doesn't bumper-sticker you with what to think with regard to the situations. He places you at the level of the interaction and lets the minds and actions of the characters weave the story. That's what, to me, makes Vollmann's writing timeless.I will now refer you to Nathan's brilliant review of this book. It is one of the finest reviews I've read on moral writing, much less this particular book.
—Jack Waters
Asian whores and a lost expat.Vollman fantasizes about what a guy who turns himself loose from his native identity might become, and the picture isn't pretty. I loved this book, up until the part where the protagonist returns to the west and starts banging smack and shacking up with crack whores. Vollman intended it as a moralizing elaboration on the Thai sex trade, i think, but lost his way in an ethical determination propelled more by feminist doublespeak than any human insight. The ending rivals Huck Finn for callow retreat from authorial vision. Vollman obviously just didn't know where to take things, and wasn't brave enough to risk challenging his mid-90's PC audience.Everything that leads up to the Great Suicidal Tragedy, though, is pure, masculine gold: a Western man discovering his masculinity through sexual relationships in an Asian environment, and then losing himself as he senses that he is as abused and misled as the women he rents. It is poignant, sad, and as perplexing for the reader as it no doubt was for Vollman himself, but in the end the author turns away from his insight for good ol' Judeo Christian moralization.Thousands of westerners discover the Asian sexual outlook every year -- both men and women, some subjugated, but most as enthusiastic initiates -- and it has been happening since well before Marguerite Duras, or "Emmanuelle in Hong Kong". Vollman could easily have kept his tragedy without engaging in such squalid melodrama; the movie 2046 deals with many of the same themes, with quite similar scenes, but manages to evade the guilt-ridden martyrdom that Vollman resorted to.That's probably because the movie was written by an Asian. But with all that said, i give the book five stars, up until somewhere around page 200 -- maybe even 50 pages before that. It's been a long time since i reviewed the ending...
—Kyle
Oh boy. Vollmann sure loves his whores. Almost every single book, whores whores whores. Even in one of the Seven Dreams books about Vikings and natives in 1000 AD, he crammed a section on them somewhere. Although I've never heard anybody else come close to approaching them with something almost like sensitivity. I suppose that's what I like about Vollmann - his talent for taking those at the very bottom, those most filthy and degraded and ignored, and making them human.A short little parable on love and obsession and degradation and redemption, and the dregs of the earth. It's jarring and sick, but also oddly sensitive and redeeming.
—Hadrian
