The Center Can Hold: Colum McCann's Apeirogon and W. B. Yeats's "The Second Coming"

Abstract

Colum mCCann’s ambitious 2020 novel, Apeirogon, takes its name from a geometrical shape with a “countably infinite number of sides.” As a controlling metaphor, this concept of the simultaneously finite and infinite parallels a structural, intertextual reference to One Thousand and One Arabian Nights—what one critic calls “Scheherazade’s famous telling of Middle Eastern folktales in order to ward off death.” Both references highlight that this novel, which explores the story of two men’s grief and their campaign for peace against the backdrop of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is about chaos and order, the controlled and the uncontrollable—and it pursues this tension thematically as well as structurally. I want to consider another reference that I believe has thus far been overlooked, but which offers a powerful intertextual gesture toward the author’s intentions: McCann’s structural indebtedness to W. B. Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming.” Readings of Apeirogon have focused predominantly on the novel’s format, which layers an array of facts with specific details from the two men’s lives in an expansive web that signals the complexity of their sociopolitical context. However, while it is an ambitious text built out of 1,001 chapters—some only a sentence or a phrase long—and layered with self-referential, intertextual, and imagistic connectivities, Apeirogon is nonetheless based on a firm, unmoving, and stable narrative center. Its series of chapters radiate out from