Caught in Circular Time: Spatiotemporal Narrative Concerns in Cloum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin

Abstract

Is History moving forward in a progressive manner, or is it circular, repeating itself in an endless cycle of violence and counterviolence? Colum McCann’s novel, Let the Great World Spin, seems to raise this question as it tries to deal with the 9/ 11 trauma by referring back to the Vietnam War. Through an earlier incident that also involves the now famous Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, McCann aspires to dissect the different layers of life in New York. Though the text has been called a novel about New York by many critics, a closer look at the novel reveals that temporal concerns are intertwined with spatial ones to create a very intricate narrative. It thus helps the reader expand his experience of the present to include the past and the future in one circular totality that deems the livable space open for a (re)negotiation of suffering and pain in such traumatic times. TEXTUAL TURNINGS Department of English Journal of English and comparative Studies VOLUME 1, 2019 33 Caught in Circular Time: Spatiotemporal Narrative Concerns in Cloum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin (2009) Fadwa Kamal AbdelRahman This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you ... The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust. (Nietzsche, The Gay Science, book IV, s. 341) Once Upon a time and long ago, in fact so long ago that I couldn’t have been there, and if I had been there, I couldn’t be here, but I am here, and I wasn’t there, but I’ll tell you anyway: Once upon a time and long ago.... (McCann, Let the Great World Spin 68) 9/11 is a real “semiotic event, involving the total breakdown of all meaning-making systems” (Versluys 8). It has literally shaken the American society, which woke up to the ugly realities of global terrorism hitting home. It has resulted in a “rupture” that marks a real and tangible change both in the American society and the world at large. Its huge impact transcends the direct losses to take on a rather symbolic significance as terrorism surpasses the present moment and acquires a circular character turning into an “echo from the past and a transitional moment which lays the grounds for the future, becoming (again) the origin for another moment in the future and so on” (Borges 5). Though Literature, in general, and fiction in particular, couldn’t have remained mute in relation to such a major event, the resulting works were not up to its enormity and complexity. R.B. London sums up the causes of this deficiency in a number of points that range between the overpowering nature of the event as well as the crises it creates, and that “it's too soon” to write analytically about such a huge event (“After the Unthinkable”). Most of the criticism dealing with 9/11 fiction, fails to include Colum McCann’s novel, Let the Great World Spin (2009) in its scope. However, the novel has been a great popular and critical success that won its author the US 2009 National Book Award and the 2011 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, one of the most lucrative literary awards in the world. This paper sets out to analyze how this novel manages to evade sacrificing the fictional and technical elements in favour of the hugeness of the event and to attain such a balanced representation that puts it under the category of great fiction. This necessarily includes an examination of the text’s structure, its use of time and space, multiprespectivity and intertextuality. The paper will depend extensively for its theoretical framework on Peter Brooks’ Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, relying on its critical practice and analysis of narrative plotting. McCann TEXTUAL TURNINGS Department of English Journal of English and comparative Studies VOLUME 1, 2019 34 has managed to write a novel about 9/11, but without being limited to its direct discourse, without being implicated in its after-shock. He has succeeded in dealing with the life-changing event without depreciating it or falling into a melodramatic and sentimental representation of its repercussions. To achieve this, he resorts to fragmenting it into “metaphors and comparisons, serving to sublimate individual and private affairs and adventures” (Bakhtin 217). Through such metaphors “the past [gains] the capacity to imagine us, and we it” (Ozick 62). Furthermore, if according to the Nietzschean schema “every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life” (Nietzsche, Gay Science book IV, s. 341) is nothing but a repetition of a previous one, then it makes perfect sense to deal with this tragedy by tackling the last one, the last war, the Vietnam war which took place a generation before (1955-75, but the peak of American interference was at the time of Nixon 1969-74). The novel is conveniently set in 1974, not only because it is towards the end of the war that the real amount of the American losses is known, and its real impact is appreciated, but also as this helps create constellations where repercussions of a multiplicity of histories can be woven together. Thus, by making use of the provision of literature that “allows us to become ourselves by becoming somebody else” (McCann, “What Ulysses Did”), McCann manages to reimagine the nature of the present by dealing with “eternal recurring facts,” with war, with loss and pain, but also with redemption, compassion and endurance; with trying to find solace in times of crisis. Hence, Vietnam “was as good a place to start as any” (Let the Great World Spin 86). The idea of eternal repetition might seem frightful, but like all the other terrifying “realizations” in Nietzsche, the superman, is the one who represents “the ideal of the most high-spirited, vital, world-affirming individual, who has learned not just to accept and go along with what was and what is, but who wants it again just as it was and is through all eternity, insatiably shouting da capo [from the beginning]” (Nietzsche, Beyond 5051). So accepting the tragic facts of life and being at peace with the idea of their recurrence is the way of the strong. According to Nietzsche, history seems to take a circular route, repeating itself in an endless cycle of wrong decisions that are almost uncanny in their similarity, in the repetition of the same mistakes, in beginning with the same premises, expecting each time things to end up differently. In this sense, the idea that history moves forward and people (collectively) learn from their past mistakes becomes a myth. But hope resides rather in the ability of people in the past to manage and live through all kinds of misfortunes like a Phoenix regenerating itself from its ashes over and over again. On a more textual level, Peter Brooks asserts that the structure of the novel, as a genre, depends heavily on repetition. Not only is the urge to repeat one symptom of trauma in the case of tragic events, but it also gives the semblance of control, of mastery. In this sense, the novel not only becomes a “total metaphor” of another war, but it is also metonymic of a nation’s strength and its ability to get over its hardships. In this sense, the Twin-Towers of the World Trade Centre become the meeting-up of multiple stories past and TEXTUAL TURNINGS Department of English Journal of English and comparative Studies VOLUME 1, 2019 35 present. McCann recourses to one of the memorable moments in the history of the place when a French high-wire artist, called Philippe Petit, performed an unauthorized walk between the towers on the 4 of August 1974. The only image included in the novel is a picture of Petit on the string, and at the upper left corner we see a plane as if heading towards one of the towers, ready to hit it. This synchronicity, or “meaningful coincidence,” not only works as a foreshadowing of the future event in 2001, but also becomes a trope that helps link the multiple times of the narrative and enhance the dynamic engagement of the reader with the plot. The towers become “the collision point of stories” and the walk turns up to be “one small scrap of history meeting a larger one. As if the walking man were somehow anticipating what would come later” (LGWS 325). It is here that “time takes on flesh and becomes visible for human contemplation, [and] space becomes charged and responsive to the movement of time and history and the enduring character of a people” (Bakhtin 84). Thus, this becomes ultimately “a book about the 70s—‘Flared jeans, shaggy hair, disco lights, that sort of thing’ ... [However, it is also] about NOW but in the guise of long ago,” McCann explains (“Let the Great World Spin Q&A”). On the other hand, Petit’s walk might seem at first glance to be representative of aesthetic mastery, triumph over the limitations of the human body and of geographical restrictions: “for it all was beauty. Walking was a divine delight. Everything was rewritten when he was up in the air. New things were possible with the human form. It went beyond equilibrium” (LGWS 164). However, the similarities between the walk and the suicide attacks of 9/11 cannot be overlooked. The similarity resides in the craziness of the endeavor and the sheer cheapness of the involved human life: “So flagrant with his body. Making it cheap. The puppetry of it all. His little Charlie Chaplin walk, coming in like a hack on her morning. How dare he do that with his own body? Throwing his life in everyone’s face?” (113). When we close-read the words uttered by Claire in the above description of the scene of the walk: “flagrant”, “puppetry”, “throwing his life”, we can arrive at the negative connotations that bring to mind the similarities to the latter incident. The complexity and multiplicity of al