Get a load of William T. Vollmann’s new title: Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater With Some Thoughts on Muses (Especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, Kabuki Goddesses, Porn Queens, Poets, Housewives, Makeup Artists, Geishas, Valkyries and Venus Figurines. In other words, welcome to the work of William T. Vollmann. I admit to being drawn to his new book, not because I have a particular interest in Japanese Noh Theater (I don’t), or because I believe Vollmann is the Noh expert of his day (he’s not) – but rather, I’m interested in experiencing the latest Vollmann experience. I mean this as a compliment.
If you’ve never read any of his books you’ve probably heard of him second or third hand, heard that’s he’s crazy, heard that he smokes crack, heard that he frequents prostitutes and you’ve inevitably heard that he writes long books. Impossibly long books. But what you might not know is that William T. Vollmann is one of the most daring, breathtaking, morally serious authors writing in English today.
While Kissing the Mask is, on the surface, about Japanese Noh Theater (and about a dozen other, tangentially related topics) it’s really just an excuse for him to write a book about capital B Beauty and Beauty’s infinitely unfolding (and folding) mysteries. He says as much in the clever opening chapter (Chapter Zero) Understatements About This String-Ball of Idle Thoughts where, in two short pages, he preps the reader for the semi-academic, but-mostly-personal-research, journey they’re about to embark on: “Deaf, dumb and illiterate in Japanese, innocent of formal study in any discipline of art, a graceless dancer afflicted with bad eyesight, I may not be the perfect author for any essay on Noh drama. Fortunately, this is no essay, but a string-ball of idle thoughts.”
Vollmann goes on to say in an extended footnote that whatever factual errors he made in the book, few people will catch them because so few people are educated in the nuance of Noh. Nothing like appropriately lowered expectations! How humble, how…Japanese! But, also, how deft! Those two little pages buy the remaining 498 pages a great deal of legitimacy, if not compassion or, at the very least, pity. (John D’agata’s About A Mountain would have benefited greatly from such a simple yet commandeering escape clause).
And in case you still weren’t sure what to expect from Vollmann’s latest non-fiction escapade, he spells it out in the conclusion of his opening remarks: “How I love my life in this floating world!…I’m a glutton, a plump middle-aged man now beginning to understand the old lechers who clutch at beauty, not that I’ll do that; I’m proud, so I’ll watch grace in theaters, bars, teahouses; I’ll invent a book about representations of feminine beauty and write off every geisha dance on my taxes….”
Got it? This is not a book about Noh. This is an imagined book (a fake book, really) designed to allow the author to experience things that he was going to experience anyway. Why not?
Actually, this is Vollmann’s nonfiction M.O.. Poor People, his 2007 response to James Agee’s 1941 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, is a hybrid research/travelogue/meditation on the relative nature of wealth (and lack thereof). While 2008’s Riding Toward Everywhere might, on the surface, be about two fifty-something men hopping trains, hobo-style, across the western United States, it’s really a meditation on America, American values and the particular kind of paradise that we Americans seem to fetishize. And 2009’s 1000 page-plus monster Imperial? (Disclosure: I only made it through the first third.) It’s “about” the history of the region between California and Mexico called Imperial but it’s about so much more – it too is about America, American values, the politics of water, land use, the way human beings treat one another when survival’s at stake. Think of Vollmann’s non-fiction as a kind of personal documentary cinema. Extremely well-researched (yet inevitably imperfect, messy and sometimes downright confusing) personal documentary cinema.
Kissing the Mask is Vollmann’s latest foray into the unknowable mysteries of the human experience and so it may come as no surprise that one of the most oft repeated words in the book is evanescence, meaning “soon passing out of sight, memory or existence; quickly fading or disappearing.” This one word could be used to describe his entire project – beauty, mystery, life itself…. It’s also useful to know that the most oft repeated question in Kissing the Mask is “What is a woman?” for this is, no doubt, a central concern of the book. “The unanswerable question,” he calls it, in chapter one.
What makes a woman woman? Vollmann’s not in the least bit interested in a biological answer (of which, he merely says, towards the very end: “…I sometimes regret that in this book about feminine stateliness I have forgotten the vibrant vulgarity of biology, the “real” world of the floating world we float through…”), and he’s not interested in a moral treatment of femininity; his aim in this book is to understand the aesthetic nature of womanhood, that is, the performance of feminine beauty. Regarding this, he says, “The withholding of a thing invests it with desirability; to the extent that it grows (or remains) opaque to the gaze, resistant to the will, it draws us towards itself.” This is femininity. Regarding the Noh performance of feminine beauty, he says: “The point is to make the audience experience skilled unexpectedness. If they anticipated novelty, they would undervalue it.” This too is femininity. And in another possible answer to the unanswerable question What is a woman? Vollmann writes: “The model’s expression in today’s magazines is neutral, not unlike a Noh actor’s, the eyes wide open, but in concentration, lips parted or not, but rarely smiling.” And in regard to a Katie Holmes fashion spread in an American magazine, he wonders, “How much of the allure is her makeup and dress, how much is diet and discipline, how much the young, lovely female body she was given?” All of these things are also femininity, a question to which he clearly seems more comfortable providing a bevy of possible answers than one pat conclusion.
Formally, Kissing the Mask, like the rest of Vollmann’s non-fiction oeuvre, is constructed of essays, interviews, (more-or-less casual) first-person narrative, photographs, drawings and oftentimes all five at once. This stylistic hodge-podge, narrated by a larger-than-life character, is what makes his books so much fun to read. One gets the impression that one is snooping over the shoulder of a semi-deranged, super bright world traveler as in this somewhat typical excerpt from an interview with Noh actor Mr. Mikata Shizuka:
“‘Where does your consciousness go when you perform?’
‘It depends. The state where you think absolutely nothing, I think it’s hard to grasp. But the intention is to show…. If you want to show something, it comes to you internally, then somehow shrinks.’
I told him about feeling in my hands and fingers when I am caught up in my writing; it is an exhilarating feeling during which my fingers do not belong to me, but to something else which is writing. What is it? I do not know. At its best, it is not an assertion of myself.”
It’s a typical passage in that we meet a character from Vollmann’s journeys, through Vollmann, and the experience is immediately translated back into what Vollmann knows best: himself, writing. This is the kind of non-fiction that drives some people crazy, in which the narrator often intrudes upon and supercedes the subject matter at hand – a practice that, in Vollmann’s case, is often and too easily passed off as narcissism. But I see Vollmann’s intrusions less as a narcissistic tendency than as an ontological strategy. Which is to say, he begins his investigation (whether it’s into violence, poverty, America, whatever…) with the assumption that things in themselves can never truly be known, an inevitability that should not in any way preclude from asking the big questions. And what better tool to refer to when wading through Life’s opaque mysteries than oneself, one’s experiences, one’s beliefs, one’s feelings? This is in part what makes William Vollmann’s brilliance – he is an investigative reporter in the truest sense, cable news networks and glossy magazines be damned.
So when, in the sixteenth chapter, Vollmann journeys to a Japanese beauty salon to be made-over as a woman (wig, make-up, pretty black dress and all) it should come as no surprise (thanks to the irrefutable testimony of actual photographs) that William Vollmann does not even come close to looking like a human woman. And so to answer his echoed question: “What is a woman?” Our one clear-cut answer might be: Not William Vollmann. Which I think, technically, disqualifies his whole argument that femininity is a performance and perhaps not an innate quality at all specially reserved for one gender and not the other. Oh, well. But then again, don’t forget: Vollmann set the book up not to create a new hierarchy of truths in regards to beauty but merely to unspool “this string-ball of idle thoughts.” And no one unspools the given world quite like William T. Vollmann.
It goes without saying that this style of writing, this kind of investigation is not for everyone. If you like your non-fiction neat and tidy, with more-or-less pat conclusions (think Newsweek articles or, say, a nonfiction book along the lines of Eat, Pray, Love) Kissing the Mask is probably not for you. But if you like a little challenge, a little adventure, a little unbridled audaciousness in your authors and if you too sometimes find yourself in awe at the inexplicable mystery and seemingly endless beauty of existence then have I got an author for you!
Shawn Vandor’s first book, Fire at the End of the Rainbow, is recently out from Sand Paper Press
