Usually I’d use the mountain analogy for a book of this size, but the sprawl and subject matter of Imperial make the reading experience more like a long, water-less trudge across the sunbaked, treeless valley it describes.
Unreliable first person testimonies. Staggeringly soporific stretches of obscure county records. Narratorial interjections from Vollmann himself, that basically admit from the beginning that the book was never going to cut the mustard as an informative study. It’s a long walk to the meticulous bibliography which, I’m sure more ardent fans would insist, is just as essential reading.
Imperial gets easier when you accept that as a work of historical reference it has limited utility. Which is hardly surprising if you’ve ever read anything else by Vollmann, but it is easy to feel that the minutiae of agricultural history in this forgotten corner of SoCal is the principal concern of the book. A good 3/4 of the novel’s 1100-odd pages document the results of Vollmann’s slapdash archival trawling with nary a substance-smoking sex worker to be seen. So as much as other reviews tout the hallucinogenic and characteristically Vollmann-ish nature of the reportage, I’d still maintain that much of it is very, very boring.
One might be able to level this as a criticism if Vollmann didn’t own it from the beginning. Right from the outset he admits he has no idea what Imperial ought to be, what shape it should take, or what purpose he can expect to fulfil by gathering the material. He can’t even be certain of where “the entity [he] calls Imperial” begins and ends. It’s not Imperial County CA so much as it is a nebulous expanse that includes bits of Mexico, San Diego, and Riverside counties – all defined by a sort of ‘Imperial-ness’ that the novel tries to pin down in its more lyrical moments.
It’s a space that has a vaguely Perth-like feel at times. White hot afternoons, flat stretches of gridded agricultural nothingness, industrial areas devoid of shade. Streets of low, sand-coloured houses where the blinds are drawn year round and ancient F150s rust away in chaotic yards.
I’ve always longed to visit these places. I think I could even claim to be one of the few international readers who came to this novel with a genuine interest in soaking up the landscapes surrounding the Salton Sea, whose shores I have spent hours wandering on Google Maps. So I can’t help but be disappointed by the fact that so much of Imperial concerns itself with archival history that holds limited interest for me.
Yet there’s something genius about all the banality, because reading Imperial is much like inhabiting it. Like the Mexican illegals who trudge through the valley’s unrelenting heat in search of lumbar-destroying labour, so too does the reader trudge through endless swathes of obscure history – senior Imperialites’ testimonies recounting the good ol’ days of Calexico, tables of lettuce prices, land holdings and so on – in search of meaning or just the odd oasis of lyrical beauty. But when it comes, it’s exactly as quenching as you hope for.
“He also said, you know, Alice, once I had to go out at night and flood the fields because there was going to be a frost. And i saw a rainbow around the moon. That was what he said.” (702)
What becomes apparent is that Vollmann is searching the terrain for meaning just as we are. And most of the time he fails to find it. His leads go nowhere. The locals don’t trust him. The unreliable testimonies he gathers confound one another. He even spends a good fifty pages trying to set up a secret camera, which only gives him a view of the wearer’s chin.
In this sense Imperial is truly unique for being less of a ‘novel’ or docufiction or whatever, than it is a record of writerly failure. A brazen attempt to tackle an unwieldy, massive theme – for want of a better word – which lays bare its own inability to find coherence or meaning. The result is a feat that only Vollmann could pull off, and one that reminds me of something good mathematics teachers always used to say. Even if you can’t find the answer, always show your working-out. As Vollmann himself writes:
“These documents permit me to make a beginning. That is all.” (752)
So maybe that’s all Imperial is. Less a novel than an assemblage of source material that aspires to some greater meaning – like the many discarded car parts and gallons of paint that make up Salvation Mountain in Slab City:
And after reading, I’m convinced there’s no other way to get to the heart of Imperial. A blank slate upon which generations of ranchers, agricultural entrepreneurs, and illegal labourers have sought to find something but so often come away empty-handed. After crossing the same desert in text I can’t help but relate. But then again, that’s exactly the point.
Jackson's Ephemera 