William Vollman's The Ice-Shirt

Putting on the Literary Analysis-Shirt

In the early nineties everyone had Jurassic Park fever. I read the novel in seventh grade then quickly read every other Michael Crichton book I could get my hands on: The Andromeda Strain, Congo, Rising Sun, The Terminal Man, The Great Train Robbery. I read Sphere on a family trip in Washington D.C. and imagined that the cavernous bowels of the D.C. Metro stations were the insides of the mysterious spacecraft discovered on the ocean’s floor. I read Eaters of the Dead, a novel I took to be a bizarre original until I read Beowulf in high school and realized that Crichton was coloring between the lines of a much more ancient tale.

William Vollman is doing something similar in The Ice-Shirt, but as a form of higher art rather then Crichton’s milking of the monster story in Beowulf. Vollman grants his novel the lofty, perhaps pretentious subtitle, “Volume One of Seven Dreams¹: A Book of North American Landscapes.” He recasts himself as William the Blind. He includes glossaries, timelines, hand-drawn maps, a few different fonts, and a striking self-portrait. His narrative voice is hardly different from that of the Norse epics he draws upon as source material. It is, to say the least, an idiosyncratic text.

At its core, the The Ice-Shirt is a novel of transformations, each one captured by the donning of a metaphorical garment. Vollman begins by describing how the ancient Norse kings put on the Bear-Shirt, turning themselves from man to bear. The Inuit who adopt European ways put on the White-Shirt. Those afflicted by greed wear the Gold-Shirt. And the demon Amortortak, the bringer of frost and death, is called Blue-Shirt as the novel opens. Each shirt carries with a way of viewing the world that is harder to take off than put on:

Oh, just as the Bear-Shirt made men see red-leaf forests through a hot rainy haze of blood; just as the Blue-Shirt made the wearer’s world glitter cold and grand and beautiful in a thousand twinkling mirrors, so the Gold-Shirt glared and shone like the sun’s eye.

This device serves to elevate the narrative from the human (where motivations can be petty, uncertain, ever-changing) to the mythic (where motivations are fixed and worn in plain sight). Thus Vollman’s characters mingle with demons and gods, descend to the underworld, and live alongside the creation myths that Vollman blends into the superstructure of his novel. Creation is in itself an act of transformation, and Vollman contrasts this mythic past with our human present:

You who know yourself to be so stolidly solid that you do not have to worry that you might turn into anything else, ever; — how do you think it must have been in those times of frightening transformation? We cannot call them freer. The Sun and the Moon, for instance, have never again been seen on earth. They were like butterflies seized and pressed into the moving album of some Russian aristocrat; yes, they still fly, but only when he turns the page.

It’s worth noting the hard-to-miss allusion to Nabokov in this lovely passage. There’s a critique here of the modern novel, that through tricks it coaxes the reader into believing that something dead is really alive. Vollman continues:

[W]hen you run up the air-bridge to become gods, your last mortal moment, aberrant or not, becomes the moment of butterfly pressing. Never will she be able to forgive him. Never will he stop wanting her. Much of their light is shame-light. So in a sense the Sun and the Moon are dead.

There’s a paradox here: that some acts of transformation lead to things becoming fixed, and that becoming fixed and frozen is the true death (unlike conventional death, which is really a natural act of change). Vollmann illustrates this with the story of King On, who sacrifices nine of his ten sons to postpone his own demise. I’ve included a large chunk of text as an example of the lyrical and propulsive nature of Vollman’s prose:

Imagine the terror that kept him from seeing that most corpses close their eyes so peacefully! How his skull gaped, before he was dead, the flesh around it hardly more than a worn habit! — and all along he had known that it must someday be so; he knew it before his father was hanged by the King of Halogaland; he knew it when he fled from two Kings of Denmark; he knew it when his wife died and was buried in the ground, with a horrible empty space beside her that waited for him, and must be filled by his dead body someday, and then his dead wife’s skull would kiss his skull in a great hard clack of bone; but his knowing the inevitability of it did not at all help him, so he mummified himself alive for his second sixty years, taking only mummy-amusements that made his mummy-mouth grin and grin in the coolness of his palace vaults where he sat to be safe from drafts and wars and angry sons; so he preserved his bones as if they were Turkish glass; but finally he had to change just the same; he had to put on the Mold-Shirt.

This tension between the transformations of life and the frozen nature of death is the central conflict of the novel, the quest of Freydis Eriksdotter to bring frost to Vinland at the behest of Amortortak². Since the Norse left few traces of their time in the Americas, Vollman creates this struggle, this movement from life to death, as a harbinger of things to come. He notes the following at the novel’s close:

My aim in Seven Dreams has been to create a “Symbolic History” — that is to say, an account of the 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. — Did the Norsemen, for instance, really come to the New World bearing ice in their hearts? — Well, of course they did not. But if we look upon the Vinland episode as a precursor of the infamies there, of course they did.

In Jurassic Park, Crichton asks us to believe that scientists can create dinosaurs from a few strands of DNA, preserved in amber for millions of years. The difficulty of such an act of creation, of a novel from the narrative-DNA left behind in the Norse sagas, is apparent throughout Vollman’s text: he notes when the historical record goes silent or is weighed down by contradictory accounts. Vollman traveled to the Arctic in 1987, three years before publication of The Ice-Shirt—he incorporates snippets of his travels into his novel—but the people and landscapes his finds there are indelibly changed:

I am maddened by the impossibility of describing Vinland, how it was in the Sun’s light with golden trees rising higher and higher the farther Gudrid went into the forest — golden trees that Freydis could never have found, for the landscape around us is but a shadow of the landscape within us.

We are no longer the same people; we can no longer see the world through their eyes.

1. He’s completed five of seven to date.

2. Basically the plot of Disney’s Frozen, if I’m not mistaken.