Waste and Textual Expenditure in William T. Vollmann’s Imperial

Abstract

As a consciously transgeneric text, William T. Vollmann’s Imperial explores the delineated realities of the US-Mexico border region by zeroing in geographically, culturally, histori- cally, even literarily via his own self-reflexive writing on the border county named Imperial. Vollmann’s intense focus on one specific area produces a sort of Pynchonian excess, melded with minimally precise “delineations,” that seeks a never quite settled ethical and aesthetic resolution of a reality where the border region is both literally divisive and ceaselessly po- rous. Such literal and literary ‘mapping’ articulates ambivalent strategies of material and textual wastefulness, it tracks toxic waste disposal and reckless waste abandonment, and it brings to light the conscious, exploitative wasting of human bodies and marginalized communities. But can a literary work of nonfiction invert the very wastefulness of waste through its own textual excesses? How does one confront an empire of waste through the very strategies of wastefulness?