Chapitre II. La possibilité de l’enquête historique

The multiplication of inaugural gestures in William Vollmann’s The Rifles is, paradoxically, paired to a stubborn refusal to offer the reader a frame of reference within which it might be read. “Text”, “book” or “dream” are as indefinites characterization as could be wished for, and all we discover on the title page is an enigmatic list of events standing in both for a generic tag and for a statement of the text’s argument. Such a strategy seems geared at dramatizing the crossing of this textual threshold while referring us back to the unadulterated, inductive activity of reading which alone is capable of reconstructing a narrative sequence from this allusive and disjunctive list. Yet a certain degree of indeterminacy remains. In so far as it is generated by a writerly activity that is only hinted at by the phrasal verb “disassembled from”, this list cannot merely be considered as a metonymy of the text to come. We must recognize that, depending on how we identify what has been disassembled, we then find ourselves confronted to an array of possible readings each with its own methodology and objectives.Recognizing the impossibility of an a priori characterization of the text, we consequently turn to its composition as a guide for our reading. The importance of source material (whether archival or contemporary), the span it covers from quasi documentary sociological sequence to personal testimony and its inclusion of graphic documents, all suggest The Rifles' proximity to the methodology of historical enquiry, which has the effect of distancing it from the literary. This epistemological preoccupation with facts and systems (as opposed to narratives), materialized by the title of this text, understood as a programmatic, analytic concept, would announce the disassembly of the novel and the heroic and picturesque narratives of Franklin that could have supported it.This hypothesis would help explain the strategic importance of paratext in the novel, as an ideal place from which this challenge to the literary might be made. In so far as it blurs the distinction between the referential and the diegetic, the paratext indicates metonymically that this text does not function as an organic whole but gestures towards a topical context with a pragmatic and political objective. It therefore comes as no surprise that Vollmann should choose this vantage to state what appears to be the purpose of the text in writing to the Makivik Corporation:Tell me if there is anything that can be done, anything that you are doing, that has hope of addressing these long term problems, and if there is anything that my readers (by and large, US and British people of average decency, without much real knowledge of the Inuit) can learn from you, do with you or help you with. (401)As is suggested here, the author literally intends to put the text to work, informing the reader of a repressed historical truth and hence hoping to convert the latter from a passive aesthetic bystander to a social activist.The idealism of this posture of setting the record straight is far more ambiguous than might have been thought at first. As we read, we come to realize that the possibility of historical discourse, and the action which is predicated on it, are challenged by an Arctic space not merely hostile but utterly foreign to it. Narrativity is disassembled, as well as the possibility of fact, universal reason, causality, objects and documents.This chapter argues that the notion of “dream”, evoked in the title of the series, comes to signify Vollmann’s program. His intentions are not so much to re-enchant the bleak reality of the Arctic world, as to expose the common dream of agency and liberation at the root of the expeditions of both the XIXth and XXth centuries. Shuttling back and forth between systematic enquiry and narrative quest, the novel exposes the illusion that Western history might be capable of fashioning and redeeming itself.

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