The Naked Child Continues Her Somersaults: William T. Vollman's Representations of Pocahontas as Myth in Argall
Devin Day, University of Minnesota
[1] William T. Vollmann is a strange man. He's been a computer programmer, a graduate student, a secretary, and a soldier. He has fought in a war, has nearly frozen to death at the magnetic North Pole, has been burned with cigarettes by a group of teenagers, and has smoked crack. He went to a cowboy college. He consistently writes about drug dealers and prostitutes, and he wrote a 3,300-page manifesto about violence. He has been nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, he won the National Book Award, and he seriously believes that he will win the Nobel Prize in Literature one day (McCaffery 321).
[2] The author's quirky work ethic is beginning to overshadow his creations. His résumé, his isolated nature, and his arduous work schedule get more media attention than does his actual work. Unlike contemporary authors who have suffered similar experiences (e.g., David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen), Vollmann doesn't let this misplaced attention bother him. He continues to churn out voluminous text after voluminous text—he will publish a 1300-page novel and a study of Japanese Noh Theater in the next two years One can expect the media will be more receptive to Vollmann the enigma rather than Vollmann's future works.
[3] As of 2009, Vollmann has finished four volumes of his proposed Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes project. According to Vollmann, he structured Seven Dreams as "a kind of long prose poem about our continent over the last thousand years, making use of all kinds of European and Native American myths, legends and stories … I wanted it to be a history as well" (Bell 280). In 1990, Vollmann published the first volume of the Seven Dreams series, The Ice-Shirt. With this novel, Vollmann attempts to revise the American past through historical literature. The Ice-Shirt begins with the initial contact between the Scandinavian Vikings, and the last volume will be about the Hopi Indians and the atomic bomb. Each "dream" contains glossaries, hand-drawn maps, timelines, footnotes, lists of his sources, and other devices primarily used in non-fiction works. Considering these readily available devices and Vollmann's meticulous research, one might assume that these texts belong in the history section of the bookstore. These are not conventional histories, however, but "Symbolic Histories." In the notes section of The Ice-Shirt, Vollmann explains that he wants to engage his reader with "an account of origins and metamorphoses which is often untrue based on the literal facts as we know them, but whose untruths further a deeper sense of truth" (397).
[4] In Argall: The True Story of John Smith and Pocahontas (2001), the third volume in theseries, Vollmann enters into the ever-growing library about Jamestown. The story of Argall resembles the version of Pocahontas narrative found in some of the more popular representations, but it also focuses on the events these conventional narratives omit. Vollmann thoroughly researched the primary and secondary histories of John Smith, Pocahontas, Samuel Argall, and others in order to produce this text. Argall is an attempt to create another chapter of "symbolic history" of the United States, one of the parameters of his Seven Dream series. The plot loosely follows the often-told narrative of Jamestown found in Smith's own accounts and those of his contemporaries, but Vollmann innovates the narration of the story. His story takes a dramatic turn from tradition with its narrative style: Vollmann wants his readers to be aware at all times that they are reading a fictional construction, a construction underway even in their own act of reading. He creates a new voice, the intriguingly named William the Blind, to narrate the novel, and this problematic narrator forces his reader to become active with the text. The narrator doesn't allow the novel to be read as factual, and he also doesn't allow the reader to regard it as merely fiction.
[5] William T. Vollmann begins the novel by narrating himself as a character: William the Blind. This new narrator starts the story in Gravesend—the burial spot of Pocahontas—and he gives the reader a brief synopsis of the plot. The first section of the "dream" has Smith in England and in Turkey, fighting various enemies and becoming a hero. Next he is landing in Virginia and getting embroiled in the politics of the Virginia council. The Powhatans capture him and, just as he is about to be executed, Pocahontas, daughter of the chief of the Powhatans, rescues him and they fall in love. The politics of the council get even more bitter as Smith becomes its President but is quickly deposed; subsequently, he has an accident and must return to England.
[6] Once Smith leaves Jamestown, the narrative focuses on the often-forgotten events in Pocahontas's life. The second section of the "dream" expands on her kidnapping by the English—an episode customarily ignored or glossed over in popular retellings—and features the menacing titular character, Samuel Argall. While Pocahontas is baptized, gets married, and has a child, she feels uneasy nevertheless about her captors, and Vollmann's representation here contradicts the conventional representation depicting her as loving her new culture and captors. Her uneasiness boils over when she is taken to England and sees Smith for the first time in years. She verbally breaks from Smith. Ultimately she dies, and the novel ends with Rolfe, Argall, and others sailing back to America.
[7] In Argall, Vollmann adopts the techniques of self-reflexive fiction. As Raymond Federman writes, self-reflexive fiction "explicitly concerns itself with the process of narration, with writing, with composition" (1143). Self-reflexive fiction arises when
the old question of historical truth and credibility, but also the question of the stability of the real, as well as the psychic depth of the subject, are no longer valid. These are now impossible questions to ask. When the historical discourse is falsified as language, all referential coherence becomes irrelevant and even laughable. . . . Therefore, all periods of American history are now being remade, replayed ironically, as well as self-reflexively. (1149-50)The story of Pocahontas perfectly fits with the causes for self-reflexive fiction. Her story has been debated throughout history with many contesting the rescue scene's credibility and Smith's reliable narration. Pocahontas doesn't have a recorded word attributed to her, and neither do the Powhatans have official written records that could support or deny Smith's histories. Without a solid, factual history, the rescue scene, one of the most indelible images in American history, has always been controversial. It sits as a blurry spot in American history that may never be proved either true or false.
[8] Vollmann takes up this blurry spot as he questions the historical truths and the process of writing history. He has said, when referring to his second volume of Seven Dreams, "If I can't get inside the head of the seventeenth-century Indian, then all I'll have written is another 'Gee, isn't it terrible what we did to the Indians?' piece of sentimentality. Hence I need to know how the seventeenth-century Iroquois dressed, traded, hunted, loved, et cetera" (Bell 281). He takes the bare facts of the stories from historical documents and attempts to flesh them out in order to create something "real." This reality isn't necessarily "truthful," however, and through the self-reflexive qualities in the text Vollmann makes his readers aware that he did not pursue truth when he wrote Argall. Like Federman, he recognizes that the historical documents are "falsified as language," and he takes the liberty to create his own reality with this false language
[9] Vollmann conflates himself with John Smith to create William the Blind. By doing so, he inherently acknowledges his similarities to the historical figure in their adventurous spirit and their literary professions. Both Vollmann and Smith, for instance, have had problems with their editors changing their texts. In a letter to his editor, Vollmann vehemently defends his work and thanks his editor for not cutting out a large portion of his book (Expelled from Eden 319-23). Here he blames the publisher's greed and impatience for wanting to cut his work. Vollmann's choice of narrating the rescue scene as found in John Smith's Generall Historie, and his choice to ignore its absence in Smith's True Relation stem from these feelings. In his endnote referring to the scene, he writes, "To me, the most important thing about the True Relation is this: It was published possibly without [Smith's] consent; it was edited definitely without his participation. In short, it is a corrupt text . . . For this reason alone, I would prefer the Generall Historie to the True Relation anytime" (Argall 722).
[10] With the text already "corrupted" and questionable, Vollmann allows himself the liberty to write regardless of history. Because history has lost its authority over the Pocahontas story, now Vollmann has every right to assert his version. When asked whether he thought history and story-telling ever conflicted, Vollmann responded, "In the Seven Dreams, history is itself the good story, and any scene I write must be corrected if it's out of line" (Bell 281). What seems to contradict his methodology in Argall actually reveals how Vollmann sees this story escaping the genre of "history." Unlike the other Seven Dreams novels, Argall has been written about in equal amounts of fiction and history—Vollmann can play with the Pocahontas story because the only primary sources, including Smith, have played with the dichotomy too.
[11] In order the better to understand Argall, the reader must be aware of how Vollmann formally structures the text. Vollmann structures in three sections, and these sections are called "dreams." He includes his own crudely drawn maps and pictures, and he never narrates these into his text. William the Blind dominates as the narrator, but Vollmann allows others to narrate, including an unnamed Powhatan; even Vollmann himself narrates a few chapters. By including his source notes, Vollmann divulges to his readers how and why he shaped the text the way it is. Along with the notes Vollmann shares his thoughts on some of the sources, expressing his reasons why he accepted or dismissed certain sources. Vollmann lets the readers see the process of writing to make them aware he is a writer and Argall is a text.
[12] Even in Argall, Vollmann writes about the process of researching and writing it. Near the end of the third dream, Vollmann includes a letter from a librarian who directly contradicts Argall's own history: "Dear Mr. Vollmann … This is a quick letter in response to your request for information on Samuel Argall's visit to New Netherland in 1613 … I know of no historians today who give any credence to Argall's 1613 experience" (521). Further down in the text, Vollmann writes, "Not based on truth? Reader, how could you or I e'er believe Argoll not to be e'erworthy himself? So let's continue the tale" (521), and he continues to write about Argall in New Netherland regardless of the actual history. Directly revealing his method and sources to his readers, he is more concerned with presenting his "e'erworthy Argoll" than with sticking to the confines of the historical Argall.
[13] Pocahontas is the main thrust of the novel. It begins with Smith in England, but the careful reader will notice that Vollmann chose to begin the novel in the same year Pocahontas is assumed to have been born (1595). In a similar vein, the novel ends at the funeral of Pocahontas. In one of the first scenes with Pocahontas, Vollmann introduces the problems of representing her. Initially, he inserts a piece of text by William Strachey and tries to narrate Pocahontas from this primary source. After the lengthy passage from Strachey—the famous cartwheel incident--William the Blind writes, "Can you see her now? I think I can" (226), and he begins to narrate her nakedly cartwheeling. He concludes that her rotating cartwheel evinces the immortality of her representation. He describes her spinning as "instant[s that] live again and will live as long as the naked child continues her somersaults. . . . Pocahontas will always be here . . . between every delighted smack of palms into the ooze Pocahontas is going forward in time and backward in time at the same moment" (227). The initial image of Pocahontas in an infinitely spinning circle sets up how Vollmann approaches his representation of Pocahontas. He sees the instability and immortality inherent in a cartwheel being provided by Pocahontas herself. The action of a cartwheel is dynamic and always in motion, never settling in a static position. Strachey actually saw Pocahontas, and the reader has to assume that he also actually saw her cartwheel. Ever since she was born, Pocahontas has been a problematic representation, and this will never change as she cartwheels through subsequent retellings.
[14] Vollmann takes liberties representing her because he sees her cartwheel providing an infinite amount of representations. He mentions the shape of the circle that "may be subdivided into an infinite number of points, the number of instants is infinite" (227). Inherent even in the shape and display of her action are these infinite instants that any writer, historian, or citizen may take up and represent. Even in four hundred years after her death, "Pocahontas will always be here; she is in every turning wheel of the taxicab" (227). Again, Vollmann uses a metaphor to justify his representation—comparing her wheel to the taxicab's wheel gives Vollmann a chance to show the relevancy of her representation to the reader. In this passage alone, Vollmann has represented her as a cartwheel, as infinity, as a taxicab wheel, and as her representation itself. Vollmann practices what he preaches, and in this bounty of metaphors he allows himself the authority to redefine her unstable cartwheel and create his own story about her.
[15] After Vollmann presents his case, he creates several different identities for Pocahontas and refuses to allow a unified character. Boldly, Vollmann rejects the notion of a single historical Pocahontas, and he offers his reader several types of her multiple characters. He codes these characters with different names: Pocahontas, Amonute, Rebecca, and Mataoaka. These characters never physically interact with each other, but they do evince which "Pocahontas" Vollmann wants in a scene. William the Blind and the English colonizers call her Pocahontas, and they narrate her as a stereotype; the Powhatan call her Amonute; the devout Christians call her Rebecca, her baptismal name; and her secret name, referred to only by a few, is Mataoaka. Vollmann creates a composite Pocahontas that disallows the reader to find a unified and static character. This last example of Pocahontas is meant to hide her "true" self from others. In other words, she has this name to have a personal, individual identity. But this goal ultimately fails when someone actually has to give her the name, and when the English learn that name.
[16] Vollmann shortens the indelible rescue scene to only three sentences, and later in the text he focuses on how he and history have narrated it. William the Blind narrates the minimal scene in a bewildered and surprised style: "See a little squaw come a-darting from Powhatan's side. She wraps her arms about Sweet John's head; she lays her cheek against his. He comprehends nothing" (224). Asterisks separate this section from the rest of the text. By separating this scene, Vollmann sees the rescue as one of the infinite instants in Pocahontas's cartwheel. Vollmann writes many of these moments, and these plucked moments allow Vollmann to present several versions of the Pocahontas story. He can take the rescue scene and insert a very quick and bare version of Pocahontas, while later he can take another scene and insert a fleshed-out Amonute.
[17] After the rescue scene, Vollmann grapples with how to narrate the event and Pocahontas. Smith stares at Pocahontas, unable to "accompt her now . . . How could he discover her face, let alone remember it?" (225). William the Blind uses "accompt" to mean, "to render an account of" (OED). William the Blind can't seem to render her either, and he avoids describing her face in favor of describing her hair, body, and garb. She didn't exist as a character before this scene, and as soon as she is introduced, characters begin to pile identities on top of her.
[18] Through the coercion of both the European colonists and her own Powhatan community, Pocahontas becomes a political tool defined by her strategic position between the two cultures. A short while after Pocahontas rescues Smith and he returns to Jamestown, Smith accuses the Native Americans of stealing weapons and other supplies from the colony. Wahunsenacawh, fearing the English revenge, "fired Pocahontas off to James Towne, to speak the soft words of his mouth" (264). Pocahontas becomes, almost literally, political ammunition when she is "fired . . . off," objectifying her as a useful tool. William the Blind purposefully juxtaposes the hard and powerful verb "fired" with "soft," to show her malleability and practicality to others.
[19] The English colonizers view her in the same intermediary way. After several more incidents of the Native Americans stealing the colony's supplies, Smith forbade any Native American to enter Jamestown, except Pocahontas, who "remain'd subject to no such rule" (299). Only Pocahontas can enter both the Powhatan space and the colony's space of Jamestown. And this responsibility adds another identity as the Powhatan messenger to the English. When she fails to come to Jamestown for a while, Smith worries, "Hath her father denied her the privilege for his own reasons, or hath her affection now staled into misliking . . . Pokahuntiss's absence doth proclaim some proximate evil" (329). Smith ascribes her as the emissary. Smith sees her as the signifier for the status of the relations between the Powhatan and the English. She didn't choose this role but was assigned it when Wahunsenacawh "fires" her to Jamestown and when Smith regards her absence as a political warning.
[20] The moments when Amonute and Mataoaka appear in the text are in stark contrast to William the Blind's narrative style. The new narrator enters, dropping the Elizabethan vocabulary and the exuberant style in favor of straightforward prose. In these pieces of text, the narrator identifies with the Native Americans. He uses the Powhatan's historically correct names—Wahunsenacawh instead of Powhatan and the aforementioned Amonute for Pocahontas. This new narrator situates himself in the minds of the Powhatan, allowing space for their thoughts and concerns. The narrator anchors the text with Wahunsenacawh's presence. Wahunsenacawh gives her the secret name "Mataoaka, which a dream once granted unto him. Before others he names her Amonute" (379). Already, Wahunsenacawh fails when he tries to give her a secret identity, since he knows about this name. Once she is given this other identity, Wahunsenacawh now sees two representations of his daughter—even at birth, Pocahontas begins her spinning cartwheel, because others have already started to create her identities.
[21] While nearly everyone else in the novel grants himself the right to impose his ideas and definitions on Pocahontas, she shies away from narrating herself and eventually succumbs to the motion of her cartwheel. She enters a moment of self-awareness when she recalls a poem Smith recites several times in the novel. Pocahontas remembers the poem, and it sings itself to her:
I am as I am and so I will beShe is a character who "none knoweth truly"; she docilely becomes what the historian/writer makes her. In this strange moment, she excises her physical self and presents her representation as immortal. The structure of the poem mirrors the ever-turning cartwheel—the continuously repetitive cycle. The slight change in the last line may not exactly mirror the first line, but it does reflect how a representation may minutely change the rotation but can't change the structure of the cartwheel. She can never escape her infinite representations, and not even Vollmann can help her.
But how that I am none knoweth truly.
Be it evil, be it well, be I bound, be I free,
I am as I am and so will I be. (462)
[22] Toward the end of the novel, she dismisses her physical presence and gives herself to the narrator. Two moments in particular have Pocahontas acknowledge her physical death and the void. One comes from the perspective of the Native Americans, "Amonute said: I am nothing" (566) -- and the other comes from William the Blind: "Oft [Rolfe] heard her mutter: Maangairagwatonu, but he knew not what it signified. So one day he did privily inquire Uttamatomakkin, who chucklingly translated: A great hole" (572). In the first instance, she plainly and calmly accepts her nothingness. In the second instance, she recognizes herself as a gaping void. The divergence of her receptions regarding her representations show her failure to fill in the void herself. She may be self-aware, but others ascribe this awareness to her, and her different identities receive the news differently.
[23] Although Vollmann focuses on Pocahontas, he reveals the process of writing through the character of Smith. Initially, Vollmann creates Smith as the masculine hero of the text. Later, William the Blind wants to give his reader the impression of Smith the hero. In the scene before the Powhatans capture Smith, William the Blind narrates an embellished heroic moment for Smith, something the actual man might have written himself. When running from the Native Americans, he still fights ferociously: "His teeth tore open the next cartridge . . . He was running backwards now. . . . Break the sprue; ball in the barrel. One more Salvage he killed withy a musket-burst, and various others he wounded bloody, yellow balls of flame rushing out on white smoke-twirls . . . " (213). These moments pop up throughout the novel as Smith boasts about his kills and heroic deeds. Smith is posed as a solitary action hero. He acts rationally even while going through Hell. Through William the Blind's narration, Smith attains superhuman qualities and becomes the exaggerated man that the histories written by Smith make him.
[24] Smith loses his heroic qualities when some gunpowder explodes in his pants, and his injuries need medical attention in England. He leaves as a "broken vessel" (363). The accident hints at the literal loss of the phallus, or symbolically, his masculinity and heroic capacity. The next time the reader sees Smith, he is writing in his room:
They feed him on butter, cheese, curds & suchlike white meats. It rains & rains. Sweet John takes up his quill and commences to Undertake his Sea Grammar, penning: A wet Docke is any place, where you may hale in a ship into the ooze out of the tide's way . . . Willoughby is his wet dock. The fierce cold tides he once throve in now weary him; he craves to hide. (581)This new, writing Smith greatly contrasts with the initial, heroic Smith. The mysterious "they" coddle and feed him soft foods. He confines himself to his room and fears the outside. Smith now occupies the role of writer/author, as the creator of the heroic Smith. The writer cannot return to his former masculine self, even through writing. Vollmann purposefully sets the reader to catch Smith writing in order to maximize the contrast between Smiths. In this very moment lies the kernel of the novel: the reader can never know the actual persons because the only way one can know them is through filtered, produced, subjective, distorted, manufactured, and biased representation. This scene makes that problem wholly apparent and problematizes how the reader approaches Smith and Argall.
[25] Argall has been forgotten in its short history. According to the self-proclaimed William T. Vollmann expert, Larry McCaffrey, Argall is "the least appreciated of Vollmann's books to date [as of 2004]" (xxviii). It is easy to see why when considering its publication date—September 27th, 2001. With Vollmann's brief job as a mujahideen soldier in the Soviet war in Afghanistan, his interviews around the time of Argall's publication dealt exclusively with the events of September 11th. In fact, in an interview with salon.com on the day of publication, the interviewer ignored the book and asked only questions concerning Vollmann's time with the Taliban (Kettmann).
[26] After September 11th, critics still ignored Argall, and it remains as the lost novel in the Vollmann canon. It my be the most daunting and challenging of his novels, too. The sheer size of the novel (644 pages) will deter any casual reader, and if readers are brave enough to begin it, they will be encumbered with Elizabethan prose, archaic words, and the complicated qualities of self-reflexive fiction. Through all these formal complications, Vollmann and the reader arrive at the conclusion that they are informed about Pocahontas by suspicious and suspect historical documents. Taking advantage of Pocahontas's cartwheel, Vollmann adds revolutions of his own. He acknowledges the glut of literature about her, but he cannot deny the attraction of her possibilities—especially in his attempt to redefine American history.
[27] Vollmann entered the 21st century with Argall, and he takes a unique stance in the debate about the veracity of Pocahontas and her history. Vollmann's multiple representations of her and his depiction of Smith as either hero or writer show how the real Pocahontas can never be known and how history can be written by anyone. He makes this latter point evident on a page describing how the reader should use the glossary, timeline, etc., of the novel. Vollmann writes, "As for the Source Notes, they may be ignored or skimmed; their function is to record my starting points, which might interest travelers in other directions." He encourages his readers to "travel" to find other texts and to write their own history. In a liberating fashion, Vollmann's idiosyncratic version of the Pocahontas story opens up any possibility in representation. To pick up his metaphor, Vollmann keeps the cartwheel spinning for everyone. His readers can invent their own Argall.
Works Cited
Bell, Madison S. "The Art of Fiction No. 163." Paris Review 156 (2000): 256-90.
Federman, Raymond. "Self-reflexive Fiction." The Columbia Literary History of the United States. Ed. Emory Elliott. New York: Columbia UP, 1988. .
Kettmann, Steve. "Creating "many, many Osamas"." 27-09-2001 Web.30 Apr 2009.
<http://archive.salon.com/books/int/2001/09/27/vollman/print.html>.
Vollmann, William T. Argall. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.
Vollmann, William T. Expelled from Eden. Ed. Larry McCaffrey. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2004.
Vollmann, William T. The Ice-Shirt. New York: Penguin Books, 1990.