Chapitre III. Une composition en fuite

This chapter examines the composition of the novel before comparing it to the structure of other works. Vollmann reiterates the opening of the novel several times in the course of the narration, to inscribe what he deems the loss of teleological order in history in his style and composition. An experience in disorientation, the novel takes up the poetic echo of the opening sentence “Walking south and south [...]” (3) several times, not only to stress that the English explorers and the contemporary American character Subzero are lost in time and space, as well as lost philosophically speaking, but also to indicate a reflection on the novel and a possible reading method. To walk south continuously within the Polar Circle means that one follows the course of the sun at all times of day in the summer. The redundancy of the expression “south and south” emphasizes the circularity of such a course and thus its endlessness. The novel uses the course of Phaeton as a structural topic. The son of the Sun in Greek mythology, Phaeton ran his father’s chariot so recklessly that he was struck by Zeus’s lightning. Like him, the explorer John Franklin and his contemporary avatar Subzero follow a course of Promethean defiance toward the fire of the sun, testing limits to great personal risk. Franklin loses his life, and Subzero endangers his sanity, and his life as well, when he stays on an isolated base at the North Pole.By returning to the opening of the novel at intervals, Vollmann structures the vertigo of the characters’ jumbled sensory perceptions in an extreme environment, for which they are ill-equipped in their quest for meaning. The syntax and the vocabulary reflect their desire to apprehend the otherness of polar experience on new terms, and their difficulty to do so in any argumentative manner, thus making way for a new poetics. In his other works, Vollmann also tends to use echoing structures, such as the palindrome composition in The Atlas (1996), or the leitmotivs that structure Imperial (2009), like so many burdens or refrains. Echoes, symmetry, mirroring composition and stylistic figures (such as the anadiplosis or the chiasmus) are the various ways he uses to suggest the depth of experience and an intuition of infinity. Structure marks the ultimate form of Vollmann’s lyricism, as his process of composition deliberately invites the reader to take part in the connecting game laid out by the echoing text, to become an active reader and a sharer of dreams.

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