Butterfly Stories
By William T. Vollmann
Grove Press, 277 pages, $22
The protean William Vollmann, who requires the services of three U.S. publishers to keep up with his annual production of fiction, has a number of distinguishable modes. One may be called the world-historical-the voice he uses for his multivolume saga-in-progress, “Seven Dreams.” Another is purely fantastic, the voice that dominates his first novel, “You Bright and Risen Angels,” among other works.
A third, which first surfaced in his mammoth collection “The Rainbow Stories,” represents Vollmann’s own highly unusual turn on nitty-gritty New Journalistic reportage, which propels the journalist close to the center of any story being told. “Butterfly Stories,” Vollmann’s latest work, employs this last voice. The book is set up to resemble a veiled autobiography, although Vollmann’s friends and well-wishers will have good reason to hope that it is not completely founded on fact.
“Butterfly Stories” (a novel, not short stories) chronicles the life of a single character from childhood to his death; this anti-hero goes unnamed but is variously labeled “the butterfly boy,” “the journalist” and “the husband.” From the beginning he is engaged in a wounded search for love but infallibly finds humiliation and suffering in its place.
Vollmann’s depiction of the horrors of childhood in the brief first chapter is brilliantly, bitterly accurate:
“The boys had declared war against the girls. Girls were ugly. Girls were sissies. Girls polluted the playground just by being there. . . . What they wanted was to degrade and brutalize. The girl would be tortured by being kissed, because it was a universal truth that kissing was disgusting, and because everyone would be watching. The butterfly boy would be likewise raped by the procedure, although it was unfortunately possible that he might rise a little in their esteem by becoming their instrument. All in all, the scheme was as elegant as it was practical. One must admire such cleverness.”
Because of his hapless liking for girls, the butterfly boy is “an untouchable, a prostitute, an eater of dirt.” Vollmann crosscuts these playground atrocities with glimpses of the Khmer Rouge killing fields; it’s a tribute to his ability that he makes this comparison seem credible.
The butterfly boy traverses an adolescence spotted by unrequited love and enthusiastic suicide attempts:
“He’d found a nice stuffy attic with an archives room that had an inner bolt on the door. Sometimes he’d go there and stand on a chair and take a good length of parachute cord, throw it over a beam and tie it, put the noose around his neck and then slowly draw his knees up to his chest so that he was suspended. The novelty of it tended to take his mind off things, although his throat really hurt afterward.”
In spite of all this he somehow survives into adulthood. Once he has become “the journalist,” his affections are equally hapless. In the long central section of the book (originally presented in Esquire as a nonfiction travelogue), he has embarked on a whoremaster’s holiday among the brothels of Thailand, then Cambodia. In contrast to his companion, a photographer who enjoys an endless rotation of girls with an almost innocently thoughtless carnality, the journalist falls helplessly in love with whomever he has paid to sleep with him, first Oy, a Thai prostitute, then the crazily named Vanna, who’s Cambodian.
The relationship with Vanna, especially, is a darkly comic reversal of the usual romantic situation in which one showers the beloved with words in hopes of winning a sexual favor. Here, though his sentiments are perfectly romantic, the journalist has (for a cash price) omnipotent control over Vanna’s body; because of the language barrier they cannot exchange a single word without the intercession of usually incompetent interpreters. Vanna becomes the perfect woman in his eyes. He wants to marry her and bring her home. Despite the absurdity of his love we do not doubt its sincerity.
“Butterfly” seems to be Thai prostitute slang for inconstancy, the insatiable appetite for new sex partners, and back in Thailand the journalist butterflies with the best of them, though he still loves Vanna. He suspects that the well-intendedness of his love may be useless:
“Please believe me when I say that he did not want to be unfaithful to Vanna this time, that he took her to the Hotel Victory for the same reason that he bought other girls drinks: when anyone asked him for something, he hated to cause disappointment. I honestly think that the journalist was fundamentally good. Even Pol Pot must have meant well.”
Behind the screen of this strange romance, there are two death’s heads lurking. One comes out of Cambodian carnage, which haunts the journalist after he’s returned to the States (to a wife he no longer loves).
“Sometimes he couldn’t sleep. Other times he dreamed of struggling in blue-green jungle the consistency of moldy velvet; the jungle got hotter and deeper and then he’d find himself in the disco again, no Vanna there anymore, only the clay-eyed skulls from the killing fields, white and brown, a tooth here and there; from the Christmas lights hung twisted loops of electrical wire (the Khmer Rouge, ever thrifty, had used those to handcuff their victims); no girls, no beer; they kept bringing him skulls. . . .”
He recognizes a twinship of eros and thanatos, without understanding it. “Why do butterflies love blood?” he wonders, watching a real butterfly drinking blood at an Asian fish market. “The beauty of the butterfly seemed a sort of revenge that left him uncomprehendingly incredulous.” His promiscuity is a kind of vision quest: “to gain more wisdom than others one must do abnormal things. . . . The husband would do it through promiscuity.”
After Vanna, it is all denouement. Back in the U.S. our hero can no longer muster any feeling beyond a distant pity for the woman he’s married to, but he constitutes himself as the husband of Vanna (who has meanwhile disappeared in another Cambodian political upheaval). The husband’s efforts to trace and retrieve her at long range are useless, and try as he may he cannot finance another trip to Cambodia:
“. . . (I)f he went back to Cambodia and found her in the disco or in some anonymous rice field whose corpse-mud and bone fragments oozed between her toes, then she’d smile at him in just the same way, so gently and lovingly and trustingly and sadly; and if he went away or didn’t come in the first place she’d never think about him again.”
The second lurking death’s head is AIDS, which the husband has contracted during his journalistic tour of Thailand or just as easily somewhere else. His reaction to the diagnosis is delight, for death will reunite him with Vanna as surely as it reunited Romeo and Juliet. There is a grim ecstasy in this fulfillment of his childhood death wish, as poignant in its way as his longing for love. Perhaps “Butterfly Stories” really is the perfect love story for our times.
