Chapter 5 - ‘History Shambles On’: William T. Vollmann and the Seven Dreams Cycle

Summary

‘Rising up, rising down! History shambles on!’ beams William T. Vollmann at the start of his seven volume, 3,298-page, study of the meaning of violence. ‘What are we left with?’ he asks, before unrolling a long list of texts and objects that have been cast aside by this history (including ‘Trotsky’s eyeglasses’ and ‘Gandhi’s native-spun cloth’):

Memoirs, manifestoes, civil codes, trial proceedings, photographs, statues, weapons now aestheticized by that selfsame history – the sword of Frederick the Great, and God knows what else. Then dust blows out of fresh open graves, and the orange peels go grey, sink, wither, rot away. […] And that’s only natural: historiography begins before the orange has even been sucked; the peeler believes in the ‘great and beautiful things’, or wants to believe; easy for us to believe likewise, since dust reduces truth and counterfeit to the same greyness – caveat emptor. But ends remain fresh, and means remain explicable.