Literary Geographies

Narrative Space in Let The Great World Spin

S. Hones

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137413130
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Combining literary analysis with a practical introduction to interdisciplinary literary geography, Literary Geograp hie s examines key elements of Colum McCann's 2009 novel, Let the Great World Spi n. Hones examines concepts such as narrative space, literary and academic collaboration, and the geographies of creation, production, and reception.

Chapter 1

Introduction

It’s early in the morning on Wednesday, August 7, 1974, and commuters are heading into Manhattan. At ground level, people traveling into work are coming up from subway stations, climbing out of taxis, and stepping down from buses. The city is full of morning noise and movement: trucks honking, subways rumbling, ferries landing, revolving doors revolving. Gradually, in the midst of the sound and the traffic, many of the commuters slow down, stop walking, and come to a halt; their heads tilt back as they gaze up to the 110th floor. They are wondering, talking to strangers, asking each other what’s going on. So high above the streets that it’s difficult even to make out a human figure, the French wirewalker Philippe Petit is about to begin a highly illegal performance. He is going to walk back and forth between two towers, a distance of 61 meters, on a 200-kilogram steel cable with no safety net. He is 417 meters above street level, holding a balance pole that is 8 meters long and weighs 25 kilograms. During his 45 minutes on the wire, he will walk, kneel, lie down, and chat with a seagull. The commuters below will be rooted to the sidewalks, mesmerized. The police, meanwhile, will be racing up through the towers and hovering, ready to pounce, in the sky.1

Petit has been working toward this moment steadily since 1968, when he came across an article in a magazine that included early plans for the World Trade Center’s twin towers. He was waiting in a dentist’s office, but immediately, seized with excitement, he forgot his toothache. Having already announced his intention to become a famous wirewalker, the moment he saw the plans he understood that the towers were going to offer him his great opportunity. In the grip of a “nearly fanatical new passion” for wirewalking, he recalls in his memoir To Reach the Clouds, “It is as a reflex that I take the pencil from behind my ear to trace a line between the two rooftops.”2 Of course at that time, the towers only existed on paper; he would have to wait until they were built to fulfill his artistic dream. But while he waited, he planned, and he practiced. He worked as a tightrope walker, a unicyclist, and a juggler; in 1971, he walked between the towers of the Notre Dame de Paris; and in 1973, he walked between the two north pylons of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Both times, he was arrested. Undaunted, his ultimate ambition remained the World Trade Center.

Petit’s preparations were meticulous. He would be the center of attention, the daredevil artist, but the performance would of necessity be a collaboration. He would have to rely on a team of friends and supporters—for financial as well as practical and moral support—and he would need his audience. It could even be said that in the end he needed the authorities and the police: to make it a challenge, to make it illegal, to make it thrilling, and to conclude and punctuate the performance with an arrest.

Petit’s triumphant performance became immediately established as a significant element in the popular image of the twin towers. Some commentators have even argued that it humanized the towers, turning the tide of popular opinion in a positive direction.3 But nearly thirty years later, with the destruction of the towers on September 11, 2001, Petit’s walk took on an even more highly charged dimension of significance. After 9/11, Petit’s audacious wirewalk emerged with renewed force as a positive and creative moment in World Trade Center history and public memory: the image of the “man on wire” became rekindled as the image of the artist presenting as a free gift to an astonished public something beautiful and full of hope. The invasion of American space that the French wirewalker performed—an invasion conceived, planned, and initially rehearsed outside the United States—was, of course, like the terrorist attacks of 2001, an illegal surprise assault on the towers. But it sprang from a radically different intent and was aimed at vastly different results.

Three Key Elements

Philippe Petit’s wirewalk between the World Trade Center towers has been placed here, as the opening scene for this book, because of its connections with three key elements to the study: (1) Colum McCann’s 2009 novel Let the Great World Spin, (2) the role of collaboration in artistic and academic performance, and (3) interdisciplinary literary geography as something that happens between, and as a result connects, literary studies and geography.4 Taken together, these three elements provide the foundations for the broad aim of this book, which is to explore a collaborative and interdisciplinary approach to the narrative spatiality of a work of contemporary fiction through a combination of theory and method in literary studies with theory and method in cultural geography.

The first reason, then, that this study opens with a narrative version of Petit’s 1974 wirewalk is that it forms the pivotal event in the case study text, Colum McCann’s popular and artistically acclaimed 2009 novel, Let the Great World Spin (hereafter referred to as The Great World). McCann’s fifth novel, The Great World has achieved both popular and critical success: a bestseller, it has also been awarded several major literary prizes, including the US 2009 National Book Award and the 2011 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. For this kind of study in literary geography, the novel’s critical and popular reception is important because it means that the novel can be studied not only from the focused perspective of a close critical reading but also in terms of promotion and popular reader reception. And because this study also considers the geographies of the author’s public persona, it is worth noting here at the beginning that McCann was born in Dublin in 1965, currently lives in New York City, where he teaches in the creative writing program at Hunter College, and holds dual US/Irish citizenship. Already living in New York in September 2001, McCann experienced the aftermath of the attacks on the towers at firsthand. “The question, as a writer,” he has explained, “was how to find meaning at all when there was, in plain sight, a world charged with meaning. If everything meant something . . . then how was it possible to create an alternative meaning, or more exactly, a novel?”5

The second reason that this study opens with the Petit wirewalk has to do with its relation to the collaborative nature of performance; while Petit’s walk was in many ways a solo tour de force, performed by a single artist, his dance across the space between the towers depended for its impact on the involvement of an eclectic collection of collaborators. These included not only financial backers, training partners, and members of the team actually involved in setting up the wirewalk, between the night of August 6 and the morning of August 7, but also Petit’s audience, the general public, journalists, photographers, the police, and the judiciary.

The position this study takes is that the writing/reading event enabled by Petit’s wirewalk—McCann’s novel—is just as strongly and inevitably collaborative an event. Petit needed inspiration from others; he needed to learn from experts; he needed collaborators and an audience. McCann, too, in writing his novel depended on inspiration from other artists and writers, local informants and experts, collaborators in the form of editors and publishers, and an audience. McCann himself is very clear on this point, emphasizing not only the sources of inspiration he took from his reading (the first being an essay in Paul Auster’s The Red Notebook) but also his local research and his informants (homicide detectives and computer hackers, among others); he has also stated clearly and repeatedly that a book “is completed only when it is finished by a reader.”6

Third, the Petit wirewalk is used here to raise the curtain in order to draw attention to a kind of energy I understand as “the power of creativity in the space between.” Not only is this study in interdisciplinarity, like Petit’s performance and McCann’s novel, inherently collaborative, it is also, in a sense, an academic version of Petit’s adventure between the towers. Literary geography, as an academic crossover field, is something else that has to happen in “the space between,” in this case, in the gap dividing and connecting literary studies and academic geography. As an example of interdisciplinary scholarship, this book is a work that is performed, as we might say, in the space between the tower of geography, on the one side, and the tower of literary studies, on the other: two well-established structures, with independent foundations, which afford different views. As a work of literary geography, this book is thus itself a metaphorical wirewalk—a much less risky wirewalk, but still, of its kind, a small adventure in the space between. It is intended to function as a practical example of a kind of interdisciplinary performance, which—like Petit’s dance across gaping emptiness—can only succeed if it is produced out of collaboration, grounded on a connecting link firmly secured at both ends, and attracts an audience.

Let the Great World Spin

As Colum McCann describes it, The Great World is “a story of lives entwined in the early 1970’s . . . [most of which] takes place on one day in New York in August 1974 when Phillipe Petit (unnamed in the book) makes his tightrope walk across the World Trade Center towers, a walk that was called ‘the artistic crime of the 20th century.’” The novel “follows the intricate lives of a number of different people who live on the ground, or, rather, people who walk the ground’s tightrope [as they] accidentally dovetail in and out of each other’s lives on this one day . . . It’s a collision, really, a web in this big sprawling complex web that we call New York.”7

Lending the narrative voice to a dozen people involved in this collision, McCann has organized The Great World into 13 chapters and one photograph. The opening chapter has a conventional third-person narrator, while the remaining 12 chapters are each narrated from the perspective of one of 11 major characters: some in the first person (“I stood looking around for Corrigan”), others in a third-person voice limited, mainly, to a single point of view (“Most days, he had to admit, were dire”).8 The fictionalized, unnamed wirewalk artist functions as the center of consciousness for two chapters and, in addition, his performance of the high-wire walk across the space between the newly completed World Trade Center towers provides one of the key narrative hubs through which the various individual stories connect. The first 12 chapters take place at the time of the 1974 wirewalk performance; the thirteenth and final chapter is set 32 years later in 2006 and is narrated by a character who appears briefly as a small child in the earlier section.

Between the 1974 chapters and the 2006 chapter, McCann leaves a structurally vital narrative gap, an empty space where readers might well expect to find the events of 9/11. McCann has in this way created a gap in the novel where 9/11 “ought to be,” and he has dealt with the events in this way in order to generate something new in that “space between.” He takes the events of 9/11 out of the narrative and replaces them with something else. That day, inevitably, haunts the narrative, but it functions like an invisible rock in the flow of a river. McCann acknowledges that both in spite of and because of the way the narrative flows around this invisible event, creating a central absence, The Great World is still, inevitably, a 9/11 novel. “This is my own emotional response to 9/11,” he has explained in interviews, “it’s not a measured intellectual response”; he hopes that this literary, emotional response will generate an alternative space for its readers, “a new space in which to breathe.”9

For McCann, who believes that “a good novel can be a doorstop to despair,” the heart of the novel can be found not in moments of disaster and loss but in a representative moment of rescue. The wirewalker’s performance is, of course, important in the narrative, structurally and thematically—but it is not “a rescue.” In fact, it has much in common with the 9/11 attacks: it is unsanctioned, dangerous, and clandestine; it takes place high above street level, in the morning light, in Manhattan’s downtown business district. McCann creates a very different setting for the event he wants to place in the gap that was made when the towers crumbled into dust: “The story comes right down to the ground, in the very dark of night, in the roughest part of New York, when two little girls emerge from a Bronx housing complex and get rescued by strangers. That, for me, is the core image of the novel. That’s the moment when the towers get built back up.”10

The Great World has inevitably been read very often as “a 9/11 novel.” McCann himself explains that “9/11 was the initial impetus for the book,” but he also insists that “in some ways it’s an anti-9/11 novel,” not only because he “wanted to lift it out of the 9/11 ‘grief machine,’” but also because it is “a book about the 70s—‘Flared jeans, shaggy hair, disco lights, that sort of thing’”—and at the same time, it is a book about “now.”11 Readers have further contextualized the novel generically within world fiction, Irish fiction, and US fiction and thematically as “a New York novel” or a work of “immigrant fiction.” Taken together, the various literary, historical, and contextual aspects of the novel make it a productive case study text for an adventure in interdisciplinary literary geography. On the one hand, its literary themes and intertextual references provide excellent material for close readings made in the tradition of a text-analysis approach to literary geography; on the other hand—and in terms of the social processes of its creation, production, dissemination and reception—the novel provides equally promising material for a literary geography approach focusing on text-reader networks.

Collaboration

Central to this book is the concept of an artistic performance or production as an event, something that happens—and keeps on happening—in space as well as time. It comes into being and then continues to unfold not only in the creation of an original performance (wirewalking, for example, or writing fiction) but also in subsequent viewings, interpretations, readings, and memories.12 This idea works with Petit’s wirewalk, but it can also be productively applied to McCann’s novel—and of course to fiction in general. Approaching the novel in this way, as a spatial event, a collaboration that is “never finished; never closed,” we can understand it as a process happening at the intersection of multiple participants, including authors, editors, publishers, texts, teachers, critics, and readers.13 The text, when it happens, comes into being in the interaction of differently contextualized processes, and these processes are each in themselves generated in the context of countless interactions across space and time. There is, of course, a real author called Colum McCann; actual copies—physical books or ebooks—of the various editions of The Great World can be purchased in bookstores or online or borrowed from libraries and friends; individuals obtain the book, read it, write about it in letters or emails or blogs, or discuss it in reading groups. The Great World happens as an event in the interaction of these elements: author, text, and readers.

This book, too, is an event. It is happening right now, as my writing and your reading interact in space and time: we are engaged in a collaboration. In fact, in the case of this particular text—originally written in English, rewritten in Japanese, and then revised and expanded in English—the collaboration involves a translator, several reviewers, and at least three editors, as well as an author (me) and a reader (you). It also involves the various other readers, colleagues and friends who contributed their participation to the event before the original English manuscript was even sent to the translator.14 Our writing-reading event will involve the coming-together across various kinds of distance (temporal, spatial, linguistic) of many participants, and as you read, wherever and whenever you are right now, you will be collaborating with me in an improvisation that pulls together multiple people, places, times, contexts, networks, and communities. Our collaboration is unpredictable and unique. It might suddenly stop halfway, if you lose patience or interest and stop reading. But at this moment, it is still a meeting-up of my intentions and ways of writing with your purposes and ways of reading. Our writing-reading collaboration also includes the participation of the many other readers and writers who have influenced our various ways of writing and reading: editors, literary critics, geographers, teachers, colleagues, students, novelists, and reviewers. It is informed by otherwise unrelated communities and disparate specialist competencies, and by a vast range of historical contexts and local conditions.

Interdisciplinary Literary Geography

The discussion of Colum McCann’s The Great World that follows is offered as an example of one kind of interdisciplinary literary geography at work, attempting to connect theory and method in literary studies with theory and method in cultural geography.15 The difficulties inherent in this kind of interdisciplinary scholarship are of course significant.16 In the case of literary geography, for example, the work has to be done in such a way that neither the literature (the texts and the study of those texts) nor the geogra...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Event of the Novel
• 3. Narrative Locations
• 4. The Great World’s New York
• 5. Narrative Space
• 6. Distances
• 7. The Intertextual City
• 8. Literary Space
• 9. Geographies of Creation and Promotion
• 10. Geographies of Reception
• 11. Conclusion: What Happens Next?
• Notes
• Bibliography