The Ticking of History in Time

                      

 

          “Literary fiction?  Hmm . . . not sure I’d like that.  What is ‘literary fiction’ anyway?”

     It’s the sort of fiction that Colum McCann writes, not only in the novel under review but in his earlier works such as Fishing the Sloe-Back River and Let the Great World Spin, fiction that requires of itself artistically ordered language of a different pith and pitch than most popular novels employ. In literary fiction, the writing itself is at least as compelling as the narrative. McCann and his contemporaries, Colm Toibin, Aleksandar Hemon, J.M. Coetzee and others create literary works that are imaginative experiences rendered in carefully constructed verbal form. Such writers are impelled by “the constant search for the better word,” as is Emily, the writer character in TransAtlantic.  Authors of literary fiction are usually committed to a way of perceiving the world that proceeds through words rather than things. The “idea of the literary” that animates literary fiction is honored in Mark Twain’s distinction that “the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightening and the lightening-bug”; and in Yeats’s claim that “words alone are certain good.”

     Colum McCann has an array of narrative skills in this absorbing new novel, but we would do well to attend to the thematic tensions that are suggested before the story proper begins.  The epigraph combines the genres of fiction and history by citing the Uruguayan journalist and novelist, Eduardo Galeano—a passage that reminds us of the continuous ticking of history in time.  “No history is mute. . . . human history refuses to shut its mouth.  Despite deafness and ignorance, the time that was continues to tick inside the time that is.” Then a prologue, although not named as such, but marked with the date 2012.  In this prelude, the reader is quietly nudged to notice the gulls.  They fly over the Irish lough and drop oyster shells that crack open when they hit the target of the slate roof.  The gulls disperse and survive by this stratagem, a trick that forces food into the open. Hunger is satisfied, ironically presaging an gorta mor (the great hunger) which has an important place later in the novel.  The prologue is brief, and we do not know as we read it that the woman who listens to the pinging on the roof is the fourth generation of an Irish matriarchal clan that will weave throughout the story; this opening scene is a partial screen capture from the end of the book.

     The gulls at the beginning and the end (and along the way as well) swoop over a triptych of historical figures: pilots Jack Alcock and Teddy Brown; African-American icon Frederick Douglas; and mediator George Mitchell who leave their place of origin and ford the Atlantic in order to—respectively—accomplish an aviation feat, shed slavery, and reconcile reckless forces.

     The novel is structured by these characters and events, which are in turn interlaced by the sensibilities of mothers and daughters who contact, challenge and comfort the men.  In their restlessness and perseverance, these women set into motion the stimulus of the “trans antic” energy that is named in the book in a brief meditation on the wide reach of the title word.  

     “Antic” in the zeitgeist of the novel can be understood in the sense of crossing over and seeking to seize, as the airmen of the Vickers Vimy do when they lift off from Newfoundland, poised on “the point of flight.  To get rid of oneself” and revel in “the miracle of the actual.”   TransAtlantic  presumes a spirit of zest that is more measured than manic.  McCann draws on a kind of grim levity inherent in the Irish manner, resident and resonant in the language, attitudes and proclivities of his own ones.  For example, he has George Mitchell reflect on Irish speech.  “It is one of their beauties, the Irish, the way they crush and expand the language all at once. How they mangle it and revere it.  How they color even their silences.  A fluent menace.”   The patois here includes humor both wicked and wry.  “He was told once that any good Irishman would drive fifty miles out of his way just to hear an insult—and a hundred miles if the insult was good enough.”  There is also the more subtle description of a political sentiment, “written on a wall on the road out near Ballycloghan, in large white letters against the gray, a new piece of graffiti: We will never ever forget you, Jimmy Sands.”  A character’s silent reaction to this cri du cœur is all McCann allots to explanation. 

     McCann rightly assumes that his readers can be trusted to recognize jokes and allusions to well-known persons and events in Irish history and culture.  So he gives us Daniel O’Connell and expects us to have at least heard of him; he imbeds a reference to Joyce’s Ulysses in a joshing “tip” to bet on a nag and presumes we will chuckle; he has Hannah, the great granddaughter of Lilly Duggan turn in repose to a volume of an accomplished Northern Ireland poet, whom she identifies simply by surname.  The diction deployed throughout the narrative has a similar literariness, some of the words are Irish argot, some are not culture based but interestingly unusual.  That is an amalgam we expect to encounter in literary fiction.  So when we come upon Saoirse, we know it is a freighted term —as does George Mitchell—and the freedom it bespeaks weaves throughout the story as an illusive force that beckons all parties to break from the past, reconcile, disperse and thrive.  

     Escape is a dominant metaphor in the section named “freeman.”  It is an account occurring from 1845-46, when Frederick Douglas was traveling in Ireland and the Irish famine was beginning. Douglas is a popular visitor.  He meets with Daniel O’Connell and throughout his trip is given the sobriquet, “the black O’Connell.”  Even though he’s well received, he’s race-conscious of every move he makes.  He attends to his appearance, sartorially and physically, being fitted by a Dublin tailor and keeping himself fit by working with barbells he totes in his luggage.  Douglas is puzzled by the Irish, and by the women in particular.  He encounters Lilly Duggan, a housemaid of his hosts and she is haunted by his presence years later.  Ultimately, a scholar tells Duggan that Douglas left Ireland unslaved, and that word burgeons into bloom for the whole story.

     The airmen, Alcock and Brown, pull off a high risk pond-hop in the same year (1919) that Yeats publishes his poem, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” a premonition which pivots on a motive the three of them share:  “A lonely impulse of delight/Drove to this tumult in the clouds.”  George Mitchell, with preternatural patience and implacable resolve, moves lifelong enemies to the parturition of the Good Friday accords.   And Lilly Duggan’s clan of women struggles to fly free of servitude, war, spousal and offspring loss; the theft of credit and recognition for what one has written; and a warding off of eviction, the specter inherent in “the ancient iconography of the Irish imagination . . .  .”

     And, at TransAtlantic’s end, the movement of the “trans antic” impulse pursues a letter sent with Alcock and Brown.  It goes astray and is tracked down nearly one hundred years later, never opened; a missive whose contents are a mystery.  An apt conclusion for a book wonderfully worded by the ticking of history in time.      

  

         

 

 

 

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