Vollmann’s ambitious ‘Imperial’ rises from a maddening mess
Published: August 02, 2009, 12:30 am
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"Imperial” is maddening. Not because it weighs 3z-pounds in paperbound advance edition, and has 208 chapters and a short novel’s worth — 183 pages — of appendices. And not because I could buy my family a decent meal for what it costs.
After all, the cover name is a worthy one: William Vollmann, National Book AwardLwinning novelist and leading member of the cohort of post-post-modernist maximalist writers — including Richard Powers and the late David Foster Wallace — who made their literary bones in the 1980s.
And, the ambition and labor here are admirably Herculean. Working on the project for more than 10 years, and documenting with his own photographs and hand-drawn maps, Vollmann set out to write a parallax history, from 1519 to 2006, of the Imperial Valley, straddling the California-Mexico border, and of the eponymous county at its heart.
The area that would become Imperial, as described by Francisco de Ulloa, traveling with Cortes in 1539, was “a poor country. The hills are barren.” However, beginning in the late 19th century the region transformed itself into an agricultural Eden by damming and diverting the Colorado River, becoming California’s richest county by the early 20th century, and America’s most agriculturally productive county for a period. By the 21st century, the county was the state’s poorest as measured by tax revenue, a landscape of abandoned farms, salt-caked fields, and heat.
What happened?
Vollmann tries to answer that question, sketching the region as a kind of ground zero for illegal immigration, land use and water use policy, agribusiness, urban sprawl, environmental catastrophe, oligarchic corporate power, and the negative aspects of free trade. The author exposes these issues’ deep roots, documenting decisions made over centuries that transformed this land from scrub to agricultural paradise to case study in failure.
He also presents Imperial as an emblem of America, and posits that the perfect storm that converged on Imperial can be connected to what the book’s back cover calls “the dark soul of American imperialism.” Here is compelling and timely material for exploration.
However, the maddening factor here is the dark soul of American publishing. Vollmann himself on some level understood the problem: “You should stick to the descriptive stuff you’re known for, advised my friend Chuck, first and greatest of all private eyes — let’s face it, Bill. Investigative reporting is not your strong suit.” This book is in almost equal parts powerful, illuminating, historic and visionary, and indulgent, flaccid, obvious and, on occasion, embarrassing.
Inchoate within this drifting zeppelin of a book is a sleek aerodynamic vehicle that could be more effectively transporting readers over the important landscape Vollmann staked out. However, he needed a better-designed craft; this project needed a sympathetic, effective and convincing editor, who could have convinced Vollmann to cut his book, a creature almost nonexistent in contemporary commercial publishing due to “right-sizing” among the vertically integrated international conglomerates within which American trade publishers now exist.
Vollmann chronicles Spanish exploration, the Native American tribes in the area, the coming of settlers, early farmers, roads, irrigation, railroads and ice, then refrigeration; the cultivation of year-round markets for previously seasonal crops and “advances” in farm practices that meant crop production based not on natural cycles but on prices in the East.
Beginning with America’s 19th century westward push and the intersection of money and politics in that expansion, large-scale irrigation agriculture was touted as a revolutionary technology and a democratizing influence that would ensure the family farm could survive and flourish. What in fact happened, according to Vollmann, was the opposite of democratizing: water rights became the target of those rich enough to buy larger and larger plots of land; these holdings then evolved into agribusiness, as we call it today.
Eventually, “farmers became absentee investors who found it more remunerative to sell their water rights to Los Angeles than to actually grow crops. As coastal Southern California urbanized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the unfettered expansion of Los Angeles and San Diego extended the cities’ reach for hundreds of miles to secure the water they needed. And, as places such as Florida began to compete with and supersede Imperial in productivity and prices fell, growers lost more and more money.”
Nevertheless, this is really a story about water, and the water that flows from the Colorado River to the Sea of California, and what humans did, and do, with it, provides what comes closest to a throughline here.
The creation, growth, and decline of the Imperial Valley is an unavoidably massive story of rare complexity and richness in its mixing of so many absorbing, important elements. “My original intent was to write a novel about Imperial,” Vollmann says on page 162: but he spends pages discussing why he couldn’t make his Imperial into a novel, and ends by writing, “At the moment I cannot presume to do anything with this story except to show it to you, tiptoe around it, and walk away.”
If only he had actually tiptoed. “Imperial” is what’s known in the trade as creative nonfiction. In this, an authorial persona and fiction’s tools — subjectivity, omniscience, fragmentation, nonlinearity, for example — are used to explore real life. A view through the unique lens of an individual consciousness, creative nonfiction’s agenda includes documenting a mind at work, and as such can be a gamble, because the persona must at minimum not get in the way of the story.
Reading “Imperial” is like going to a movie with a talker who describes what you are both seeing, and then tells you what to think about what he’s just described. In addition, your companion won’t shut up about how much he likes porn, and how the floor’s stickiness is nauseating him, and about his personal quest to find the perfect dish of calamari, while you’re trying to follow the freaking movie.
There’s a lazy sarcasm troweled over the text. After 20 pages, we get the point, see the reasons for anger at the way land and people have been treated over the centuries documented here. However, after 1,100 pages of this, it is the voice and not the subject that inspires sourness.
“Imperial” wobbles with digressions, a staple of creative nonfiction but here not always connecting or reconnecting to the main trunk of the story.
In the end, Vollmann’s achievement may perhaps be analogized from his divagation on painter Mark Rothko in Chapter 46, “Paintscapes”: “Nothing is or can be distinct; we’ve almost come to that chapel in Houston [Rothko’s commissioned Houston Chapel] where, in one admirer’s words, all that remains of Rothko’s once rich colors is a deep darkness from which everything . . . slowly emerges.”
In spite of its flaws, something big and significant does emerge from “Imperial.” The book works a sly Rope-A-Dope on the reader, and packs a real punch.
Maddening, maybe, but a knockout of an important book about America.
Ed Taylor teaches English and writing at Canisius College and Buffalo State College.
NONFICTION
Imperial
By William T. Vollmann
Viking 1,308 pages, $55
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