Vollmann Feels Your Pain (RV#2)

For anyone who has ever felt the sting of being overlooked, now you know Vollmann understands you. From The Royal Family:

Yes, the overlooked--what a fine category! Failing private detectives with their envious ears, self-pitying child molesters who want to "explain" themselves to every stranger at every bar, customerless prostitutes, lawyers who haven't yet made full partner, and I myself, described in the introduction to the Japanese translation of one of my novels as "a minor writer"--oh, sting!--and you yourself, reader, who suffer from this world's deficient appreciation of your qualities--and for that matter all of us living creatures, for up to now we've been rudely overlooked by death--which reminds me of the dead, for they get overlooked not only by us but also by each other . . . In short, overlooked signifies everyone except lucky Cain, who flees from one wilderness to the next, pursued by recognition of his immortal Mark.

So in other words, be happy you can scuttle out of the way like a beetle. Be glad you go unnoticed.

Here Vollmann alludes to several of his main characters ("failing private detectives," "customerless prostitutes"), calling them "overlooked;" he also says that Cain was the one person who was not overlooked, because of his mark. This is strange because those very same characters are repeatedly called Canaanites and are marked as Cain was, albeit metaphorically.

I think the difference here is that Cain did something to earn his mark--he struck down his brother--whereas Vollmann's Cannanites are born with their mark. Significantly, none of Vollmann's Cannanites have the backbone to do what Cain did--they prefer to go unnoticed.

I think this is where most of their tension comes from. They have the mark of Cain, which impells them to strike out, but they prefer not to. Much of the book plays out their struggles against themselves.

It's worth noting that another German, Hermann Hesse, also placed a metaphorical mark of Cain on his characters. In Demian, Hesse may have been most explicit with this mark, but all of Hesse's protagonists would have been familiar to Vollmann's Cannanites. Like Vollmann's detective and prostitutes, Hesse's protagonists are outsiders uncomfortable in society. Also like Vollmann's protagonists, they fought between a desire to submit to and become part of soceity and a desire to strike out on their own.

As Vollmann indicates, by lumping us with the overlooked, this tension is something that many of Vollmann's readers identify with. To the extent that Vollmann animates this dilemma, The Royal Family is very pertinent reading, not just for prostitutes and the sexually disturbed, but for anyone who feels alienated from society. Vollmann's book is interesting, though, because it goes so far, taking characters from the absolute poles of the spectrum and portraying their shattered lives in disgusting, abundant detail.

Comments

[c]

what do you mean another German?

[c]

what do you mean another German?