The Slow Demise of Modernism, Aleatory Keepsakes, ’70s Trauma
and Looking through the Glass Darkly in Colum McCann’s Let
the Great World Spin
Sandra Singer
Do you remember, your President Nixon? —David Bowie, Young Americans
Abstract
The article focuses on text-based image constructions in Colum McCann’s 9-11 novel, Let the
Great World Spin (2009). Disparate largely first-person narrators reveal the dark subterranean
content of the narrative mostly taking place in the ghettos of New York struggling with (Nixon era) moral and economic bankruptcy, poverty and the aftermath of the Vietnam War. A range of characters viewing Philippe Petit’s widely seen wire-walk between the Twin Towers on August 7, 1974 introduce themes of beauty and transcendence. Postmodern art including the wire-walker’s performance, comics, subway tags, and family keepsakes contrasts with conventionally modernist art and architecture.
Résumé
Cet article se propose d'analyser les représentations visuelles agencées par Let the Great World Spin (2009), un roman post 9/11 de Colum McCann. Une série de narrateurs dévoilent peu à peu la thématique très noire du récit qui se déroule essentiellement dans les ghettos de New York confrontés à la fois à la faillite morale et économique (le récit est situé dans la présidence de Nixon), la pauvreté et les séquelles de la guerre du Vietnam. Plusieurs personnages du roman ont assisté à la prouesse du funambule Philippe Petit, qui a traversé sur un fil la distance entre les Tours Jumelles le 7 août 1974. Leur témoignage introduit dans le roman les thèmes de la beauté et de la transcendance. Le texte construit une opposition entre l'art postmoderne, dont la performance du funambule, les bandes dessinées, les tags du métro et les albums de famille, et l'art et l'architecture traditionnellement modernistes.
Keywords
Let the Great World Spin’s popularity is evidenced by its positioning as a Best Seller, its garnering
of many literary awards and its generally favorable reviews in newspapers, trade journals and scholarly texts. As part of the burgeoning 9-11 fiction genre, most critical appraisals recognize its positive, redeeming images, for example in the figuration of the Twin Towers tightrope walker as Christ (modeled on high-wire artist Philippe Petit, who walked between the Twin Towers on August 7, 1974); but also in the rescue of “two darling little girls” Jaslyn and Janice Henderson “coming through the globes of lamplight” from out of South Bronx squalor living amongst prostitutes1; or in
the highly developed and sympathetic character portrayal of John Corrigan (who is often compared to then-contemporary social activist Daniel Berrigan and other Catholic liberation theologists2).
Arguably, optimistic paratextual messaging (encouraged by a lengthy commentary and interview with the author at the back of the trade paperback edition) helped sales of the book that in its affect appealed to a post 9-11 mindset where readers are trying to make sense of the destruction or simply wishing to “move on” or forward to different future times. But without referencing the darker subterranean content of the narrative mostly taking place in the ghettos of New York struggling with (Nixon era) moral and economic bankruptcy, poverty and the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the reader is unlikely to fully appreciate the emotive force—that is, the desperation—of the disparate mostly first-person narrators, nor dissect the text’s deeper socio-cultural structures and its possible consequent meanings.
This chapter argues that Let the Great World Spin recovers a moment in American history that haunts the post-9-11 American imaginary. The ’70s are representative of a shift in thinking from modernism to postmodernism where certainties about progress and human greatness are deconstructed in thought and practice. The turn to postmodernism is evident in the title of the book that indicates a lack of human control over events, whether in day-to-day occurrences or historical markers such as 1970s Vietnam or 2000s Afghanistan and Iraq. Postmodern identity will be illustrated by way of the following: 1) deflating the notion of the hero; 2) questioning the role of religion; 3) reissuing of names as subway tags and computer aliases; 4) desiring and holding on to lucky keepsakes; and 5) renewing scrutiny of trauma, whereby morality is doubted, human agency problematized, and human suffering revalued. Narratives furthering distributive justice of the state are queried as the new global economic model reinvigorates hierarchical class inequity.
1. Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2009), 321. Further references to the novel will be cited in
parentheses, (LGWS, 321).
2. McCann supports the comparison when he states, “I knew I wanted to write about Corrigan, who was initially based on the
Modernism Introduced
Symbolism is a key aspect of literary modernism itself that is worked in the novel. Many of the popularly perceived positive images in Let the Great World Spin promoted by author McCann himself are actually ambiguous. In McCann’s view, the little girls mentioned above, Jaslyn and Janice, are cast deliberately as a promising embryonic sign of hope (“the core image of the novel. That’s the moment when [they emerge from the housing complex that] the towers get built back up”3). This “rescue” though takes place as a consequence of their mother’s sudden death, hardly
then an unalloyed celebratory, joyous moment. It is night when this epiphanic moment occurs, and the novel serves to show that even though they are only two or three years old the girls’ vision remains well aware of remaining shadows over their potential and grayness in their future moral decision making.
Modernism is also factored into the artistic taste of protagonist Judge Soderberg, who had a formative university relationship with the modernist poet and lawyer Wallace Stevens. Stevens’s characteristic poem “Anecdote of the Jar” gives a sense of the order Soderberg hoped to impose over the “slovenly wilderness” of New York crime. Stevens’s poem written in populist American vernacular speaks of an omnipresent jar “placed…in Tennessee”: like the Towers (and the wire walker between them) that are seen from many vantage points, “It took dominion everywhere./The jar was gray and bare./It did not give of bird or bush,/Like nothing else in Tennessee.” A Joan Miró painting is particularly important in this context of highlighting modernist cultural forms and the cult of the artist (or award-winning poet Stevens). Soderberg covets the possession of a Miró painting that hangs in the family Park Avenue New York penthouse, for example, though the painting itself is never described. In 1974, Miró created a tapestry for the World Trade Center. It was one of the expensive works of art destroyed during the September 11 attacks.4 As a Surrealist
painter, Miró is expressive of Soderberg’s belief in the power of knowledge and the valuing of conscious decency over unconscious confusion. The novel ultimately rejects Soderberg’s rationality that extends to his personal, family relations. His only child was killed as an American soldier in a grenade attack in Vietnam. Solomon Soderberg now lives with his wife Claire, who fusses over her appearance and the shine of the apartment. Claire’s own prosperous Southern father “called her 3. “Author Q & A: A conversation with Colum McCann and Nathan Englander [published in the Random House paperback, 2010]
http://www.randomhouse.com/acmart/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780812973990&view=printqa (accessed November 2, 2012).
4. “Art Works Lost in WTC Attacks,” Insurance Journal October 8, 2001
modern,” and the narrator focalized through Claire equates her with Soderberg’s other art installations in the apartment: “Modern. Like a fixture. A painting. A Miró” (LGWS, 78).
A hero—the modernist exemplar—by design courts danger, overcomes danger, and is looked upon with high esteem as a possible role model to follow. The Twin Tower wire walker would certainly meet these criteria. In terms of modeling heroic bravery, parents may name their child after an historical, heroic figure. So Solomon and Claire Soderberg name their only son Joshua, recalling a biblical warrior king, who against all odds defeated the greater forces stacked against him. The judge’s clearly marked projected values weigh in on his assessing the “crime” and also his sentencing of the wire walker when the case is brought to him. Justice—as represented in modernist Judge Soderberg’s courtroom—is deconstructed as a non-emotive abstraction, its outcome largely determined by economic happenstance, especially drawn on race and class. In another apartment painting, of Soderberg himself, the “eyes” of the judge “seemed to follow” the vulnerable black youngsters Jaslyn and Janice, worrying them when they visited Claire in their childhood with their guardian Gloria (LGWS, 335).
The judge is well aware of the wire walker’s special relationship to historical iconography and American modernism (in transition to postmodernism) when he recognizes Petit’s “stroke of genius” in turning himself into a living monument; unlike his own image in the painting or London’s plethora of historical and figural art objects, the wire walker is interpreted as “A monument in himself. He had made himself into a statue, but a perfect New York one, a temporary one, up in the air, high above the city. A statue that had no regard for the past” (LGWS, 248). Soderberg compares this inventiveness to that of his son Joshua, though he regrets having introduced his son to toy soldiers (LGWS, 263) instilling he imagines the enduring legacy of war.
“Death of God”—Corrigan’s Struggle
Irish literary critic Eóin Flannery depicts the tightrope walker as good, a larger-than-life Christ figure. The unnamed wire walker is aligned in this regard with the Catholic monk John Corrigan who ministers in the Bronx to drug-addled prostitutes and seniors in a nursing home. The tightrope walker and Corrigan compare to an updated, American (modernist) hero. Modernism as a cultural movement can be productively discussed in relationship to Corrigan’s struggle with religion (as symbolized in the “Death of God” Corrigan himself): his brother Ciaran Corrigan depicts him as “a mad, impossible angel” (LGWS, 17). The stylized cross (representing the wire and the pole) juxtaposed to a sketch of the city scape introduces each of the books of Let the Great World Spin
and reinforces Christian iconography of death and redemption. Corrigan lives in poverty amongst “the fallen”—prostitutes and drug users. He also attends to the elderly from an impoverished nursing home, ministering as a religious figure, care-giver and off-site driver. Flannery interprets the novel describing “redemption through empathy.”5 Through the “brachiated and democratic
structure” of the novel, “in tandem with one of its central themes, creative daring,”6 the tightrope
“walker…flags the roles of faith and belief in the overall narrative.”7 Corrigan’s death relinquishes
his role in upholding faith, which others must learn or fail to sustain.
Some characters and their representative positions necessarily cease to exist, such as Corrigan’s, as mid-way through the text he dies in a tragic car accident. Before death he has already given up his ascetic religious vow of sexual abstinence, when he makes love to Adelita—a nurse and immigrant mother of two children whose Guatemalan husband had been killed in the civil war. The theme of family and community amongst the underclass puzzles but “thrill[s]” Judge Soderberg during the trial of drug addicts and prostitutes by trade through generations Jazzlyn and Tillie Henderson, respectively mother and grandmother of the “rescued” Jaslyn and Janice: “What sort of deep cruelty, he wondered, allows a family like that [of this daughter and mother]? Still, it always surprised him, the love these people could display for each other” (LGWS, 268). Soderberg also recognizes “some layered beauty” (LGWS, 272) in Tillie Henderson. For Flannery, “redemptive solidarity”8 is crucial to the novel’s message and impact.
Affective connection between characters outranks the “clash of communicative or narrative codes” in the various chapters that use a classic modernist approach with “no mediation [such as not immediately identifying the speaker] to untangle this confusion.”9 Endorsing the “agency of the
marginal voice,”10 McCann’s fiction includes focalized, limited-third-person or first-person delivery
that is common to the modernist movement focused on subjectivity and art. However addressing a time period characterizing the transition from modernism to postmodernism, the novel’s strength is drawing connections between the various individual characters whose communication in discretely marked sections reflects radically incommensurable social positions, rather than offering up any elite controlling viewpoint. In this respect, Ciaran Corrigan accounts for his brother’s faith in God, 5. Eóin Flannery, Colum McCann and the Aesthetics of Redemption (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2011), 204.
6. Ibid., 204-205. 7. Ibid., 213.
8. Ibid., 226.
9. Ibid., 206. 10. Ibid., 219.
found in John Corrigan’s practice of religion amongst the disadvantaged:
What [John] Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth—the filth, the war, the poverty—was that life could be capable of small beauties….he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same. (LGWS, 20)
McCann sustains this symbol of light against darkness in the “rescue” of Jaslyn and Janice. The importance of light—a small light in a much larger field of darkness—remains in the final scene in 2006, written in the present tense, when Jaslyn draws light into a room where Claire Soderberg approaches death: Jaslyn opens the curtains extending “A tiny triangle of light where the curtains don’t quite meet….We stumble on, now, we drain the light from the dark [night], to make it last,” the narrator comments (LGWS, 348-49).
Erasure of Names through Tagging, and Hoping for Luck
If the mid-1960s are understood as the time period when the theories of postmodernism were first introduced (in architecture, in philosophy, or in literature), then the 1970s setting of much of the novel provides a pivotal point of transition from modernist privileging of images and symbols to postmodernism where ideas of reification, destruction, and negotiating the void of meaninglessness gained greater acceptance and play in society at large. In terms of identity formation, the recording of signatures by subway graffiti name tags can be analyzed as identifying a moment in historical consciousness on the cusp of postmodernism (indicating a shift from the cult of personality and individualism to protean being following Lacan’s model of the desiring barred subject). Spray-painted onto the subway tunnel, these tags have a transitory existence, as they are removed when discovered by the subway authority by white washing. In a game of cat-and-mouse, the taggers risk injury by returning to the subterranean world to improve on or add to their previous artistic effort.
The subway tag signatures, like computer aliases, are postmodern performances themselves —without recourse to any notion of essential selfhood. In the novel, the use of aliases for the purpose of anonymity is necessary for protecting the integrity of the military operation that Solomon and Claire’s son Joshua is involved in. Enemy hackers functioning within the American cyberspace are similarly unidentifiable by name. Joshua was part of a military team developing a computer program to accurately account for the battlefield dead amongst American troops in Vietnam. These dead are accounted for in computer code only in number (as totals—without name).
Joshua’s Park Avenue bedroom (after his death on duty in Vietnam) is kept as it was, in memory, but the collected memorabilia consists of boyhood mechanics. All the fictional characters hold keepsakes dearly. In a game of chance amongst his fellow hacker working buddies on August 7, 1974, hacker Sam Peters manages to get free calls through from California to the New York site of the wire walker. Here the group chats with Sable Senatore a librarian in a research library in the towers (LGWS, 193-94), and a Hispanic viewer of the event, José (LGWS, 179). The young fourteen-year-old fictional photographer of graffiti tags, “Horatio José Alger” as he is called by The
New York Times security guard, conjures up his imagined business card: “Fernando Yunqué
Marcano. Imagist” (LGWS, 172). José describes the morning’s unfolding events over the street pay phone to the hackers in California. The only photographic image that appears in the novel—of the wire walker—is attributed to Fernando Yunqué Marcano (LGWS, 237). Newly valued objects representing the coming of the postmodern age include this one photograph deployed in the novel, first saved by Jazzlyn, and then in the next generation found at random, but treasured by Jaslyn.
McCann affixes the photograph itself at the end of Tillie Henderson’s testimony in her prison diary recounting the road from sentencing to jailhouse suicide, and just before the account of the wire walker’s training and preparing in New York for his walk (that predates the photograph). Death is prefigured in the reader’s mind by the plane seen in the photograph flying toward the second Tower. The photograph includes the Twin Towers, the wire walker with his balancing pole and a large ominous passenger or cargo plane flying right to left at the top of the image toward the South Tower. The plane moves in the trajectory of the second plane that hit the South Tower, confirming 9-11 as a terrorist event for most viewers. Tillie’s final words thus also foretell impending death on a larger scale: “I’d say good-bye, except I don’t know who to say it to. I ain’t whining. That’s just the fuck-off truth. God is due His ass-kicking. Here I come, Jazzlyn [who has died while her mother is in prison], it’s me” (LGWS, 236). Talismans are not enough to bolster Tillie Henderson: Ciaran gives Tillie Jazzlyn’s “keyring with the babies on it” (LGWS, 210), a talisman Jazzlyn had carried around, but its hope is not enough to sustain Tillie after her sentence is increased and she learns she will be sent out of state to serve further time.
Since becoming a lawyer Judge Soderberg also dipped into popular culture that includes the media and comics. By his office door he keeps a posted comic concerning justice and retrospectivity. Aside from “All of Wallace Stevens, signed and arranged in a special row” (LGWS, 250), at the entrance to his office Judge Soderberg covets a New Yorker cartoon “neatly framed”: within its tidy frame, it nonetheless offers up a lawyer joke; the caption states: “Moses on the
mountain with the Ten Commandments, with two lawyers peeping over the crowd: We’re in luck,
Sam, not a word about retrospectivity” (LGWS, 250, emphasis in original). Legal retrospectivity
would hold the court accountable to past harms, and by extension cerebral Soderberg culpable for Tillie’s hopelessness, then suicide in prison; and her daughter Jazzlyn’s death after leaving the trial. In the paratextual comments to the novel, McCann emphasizes “responsibility” even for inherited circumstances over which one had no initial control. He makes reference to his own father-in-law’s shoes worn as McCann’s relation made his way down from the fifty-ninth floor of the North Tower on 9-11. McCann keeps the dusty shoes in his New York writing room, “behind [him], over [his] left shoulder, a responsibility to the past.”11 He describes the shoes having escaped the traumatizing
scene “waiting” for there to be an opportunity for them “to speak.”12
As in the text of Judge Soderberg’s comic, or in McCann’s father-in-law’s chancing to be on the fifty-ninth floor of the North Tower, luck is configured as part and parcel of existence. While the roll of the dice sometimes leads to good luck as in the much mentioned by-chance meeting up of Claire, Gloria and the orphaned girls, Jaslyn and Janice, at the entranceway to Gloria’s apartment complex, bad luck abounds throughout this narrative. For example, Joshua’s death by a grenade attack in a café is considered a case of his being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Similarly Jazzlyn’s and Corrigan’s deaths in a vehicle collision is described by Blaine the driver of the other vehicle as an improbable occurrence: he says, “Bad luck’s a trip I don’t go on” (LGWS, 119).
Aleatory objects representative of good luck are indicative of a postmodernist come-by-chance relationship to the future perhaps signified by Tillie’s come-by-chance meeting with Andy Warhol— synonymous with postmodernism—which Tillie describes in her diary (LGWS, 207). Towards the end of the novel, describing events happening in 2006, Jaslyn covets Marcano’s photograph of the wire walker taken on the same day as the death of her mother; Jaslyn discovered the photograph by chance at a garage sale in San Francisco in 2002: “one of her favorite possessions….When she travels she always tucks the [now framed] photo in tissue paper along with the other mementoes: a set of pearls, a lock of her sister’s hair” in her suitcase (LGWS, 326). In the photo she sees “One small scrap of [personal] history meeting a larger [9-11] one. As if the walking man were somehow anticipating what would come later” (LGWS, 325), but the audacity of his figure “a dark thing against the sky” (LGWS, 325) gives her hope. Jaslyn and Janice escape their mother’s profession and fate, and move forward but in opposite directions in relationship to their mother’s past: Jaslyn 11. McCann, “Author, Author: Stories Are There To Be Told,” The Guardian September 5, 2009
“wanted to know more [“about…Corrigan, who had died alongside her mother”]. Her sister was the opposite—Janice wanted nothing to do with the past” (LGWS, 341). Using interpersonal affective skills developed in her childhood and taking on a role similar to John Corrigan’s, Jaslyn “go[es] around the trailer parks and hotels and all” after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, helping people without personal and financial means to negotiate government bureaucracy (LGWS, 329). Jaslyn thus becomes a sort of social worker with a small foundation encountering the community of the poor comparable to the one she was born into, whilst her sister Janice serves as an American soldier (in relationship to the Afghanistan mission). To Janice the past represents loss only, or compares to “a jet that was coming in with dead bodies from the Middle East” (LGWS, 341). Yet tellingly, while Janice imagines she escapes the 1970s past, she falls into a role in America’s post-millennium wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that the novel casts in the shadow of the earlier Vietnam conflict.
Trauma Tales
Psychological trauma is conveyed through powerful first-person accounts from various focal figures: 1) Jaslyn and Janice’s grandmother, prostitute Tillie Henderson’s abrasive, fractured prison diary; 2) (the woman who rears the two girls) Gloria’s lengthy first-person account of her family’s slave past, and the loss of her two brothers in WWII; 3) Claire’s recounting of her son killed in Vietnam; and 4) other accounts of loss through the Vietnam bereaved mothers’ support group conversations. Tillie’s is a multi-generation family trauma and Gloria’s more explicitly drawn on the historical trauma of slavery, but both can be contextualized historically and theorized. Psychologists such as R. D. Laing and A. Esterson, and Bruno Bettelheim gained public prominence in the late ’60s and early ’70s—the time frame of most of Let the Great World Spin.
Specializing in family-configured trauma and its symptomatic continuance, Laing and Esterson investigate psychopathology in order to separate out roles that individuals perform in dysfunctional families. They are interested in determining “[t]he way in which a family deploys itself in space and time,…and what things are private or shared, and by whom—these and many other questions are best answered by seeing what sort of world the family has itself fleshed out for itself, both as a whole and differentially for each of its members.”13 Tillie’s mother had “been on the
stroll too” (LGWS, 199). Laing and Esterson’s approach applies to Tillie’s legacy of the “space” of female prostitution that she regrets passing on to Jazzlyn, and importantly the sisters Jaslyn and Janice who “differentially” find a self-critical, ontological relationship to this troubling past.
13. R. D. Laing and A. Esterson, Sanity, Madness, and the Family: Families of Schizophrenics (London: Tavistock, 1964), 7-8. See
Signifying (Holocaust) trauma,14 Bettelheim’s psychiatric theory and practice offers an
account of enduring effects of unavoidable historical trauma that includes the legacy of slavery that Gloria’s family struggles to get up from under. Referring as well to circumstances in the novel, a psychiatric condition post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was first recognized by the American Psychiatric Association amongst returning Vietnam soldiers,15 at the same time as stark images of
physical wartime trauma were being circulated: in magazines (Life was stunning, particularly large and graphic) and in color (formerly black and white) television.
Through these postmodern tales of traumatic loss in arguably meaningless pursuits, the victimized and marginalized in society (such as Gloria, who loses all three of her sons in Vietnam) are given a voice—rather than just the modernist “Greats” of high art or the stars of Hollywood entertainment. Trauma narratives and trauma theory became part of the deconstructive “ethical turn” of the 1990s16: accordingly identity formation in the novel is understood through constructivist
performance that is nonetheless attributable to ongoing, repetitive, past crisis (or trauma). So Jaslyn bears the mantra of social responsibility learned from her guardian Gloria when she visits dying Claire. A member of the Vietnam bereaved mothers support group, Gloria took in Jaslyn and Janice after their mother was killed accidentally in the freeway collision in a car driven by John Corrigan with their mother as a passenger. Accepting her responsibility to the memory of her guardian Gloria’s friendship with Claire Soderberg, wife of Judge Soderberg (who had sentenced Jaslyn’s grandmother to eight months in prison for petty larceny), Jaslyn visits Claire when she is very ill near death in her Park Avenue apartment. Jaslyn does so under suspicion for her motivations by a relative who hovers around the death scene, speculating with real estate agents about the value of Claire’s property.
Another example of constructivist performance attributable to past crisis is evident in Lara’s actions. She is another of the visual artists in the novel (in addition to the wire walker, subway tagger, and the “Imagist” photographer). Jazzlyn’s death is partly caused by cocaine-tripping Blaine and Lara who escape the scene of the car accident; later, informed by Lara of her side-kick role as passenger in this past tragedy, Corrigan’s brother Ciaran falls in love with Lara and they return to Dublin to his (and John Corrigan’s childhood) house (“the same place the brothers had grown up” 14. See Bruno Bettelheim, The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age (New York: Avon Books, 1979) and his Surviving, and
Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1979).
15. Cathy Caruth, Introduction, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth, 3-12 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1995), 3.
[LGWS, 342]) to live. Interwoven trauma narratives in McCann’s novel function as the model for a recent way of grasping consciousness and personhood as historically placed and partial, or under construction (a representation that is familiar to readers of Dominick LaCapra and Cathy Caruth’s psychoanalytic approach to trauma). For Caruth, “the particularity of each individual story” does not allow a “generalizable set of rules”17 governing trauma and its expression. Both Tillie’s and
Gloria’s example of intergenerational trauma defies conscious grasping, and is accessed rather through their first-person accounts later in the novel revealing incidents of trauma within the family and society. In form, the style of each of the accounts is symptomatic of the character herself and her losses.
Gloria gives a historical account of her family’s past in southern Missouri through generations. Her mother is traditional, and raises five sons and a daughter Gloria. Like Gloria’s three sons, her two brothers—members of the lower class—die as soldiers for the various American imperial adventures. Guardian Gloria’s daughter Janice similarly enlists in the US military. Gloria’s father living in the antebellum South, his role defined by the Jim Crow laws, provides for his family as a sign painter, a servile position that he takes pride in, but through which he is unable to advance. His loving wife sells her grandmother’s “exchange slip from when [she] had been sold [as a slave from Ghana]…to a museum curator who came from New York” (LGWS, 286-87), so she can buy a sewing machine in order to take in work. She also cleans at a local newspaper office until her husband has a mild heart attack. Gloria attributes her impulse to care for Jaslyn and Janice to this past: “It was a deep-down feeling that must’ve come from long ago….I guess you live inside a moment for years, move with it and feel it grow, and it sends out roots until it touches everything in sight” (LGWS, 285).
Tillie writes a more personal accounting of her life in a diary format. A diary without dates, not in chronological order, the writing is sometimes matter-of-fact and always emotionally charged. So, for example, addressing the topic of her profession, she coldly speaks of providing a valued service to “boys…coming home from ’Nam….they needed loving. I was like a social service” (LGWS, 208-209); but in a much more despairing and impassioned voice while speaking of her pimp, co-workers, daughter and grandchildren, she reinforces: “I’m a fuck-up and my daughter is no more” (LGWS, 214).
While themes of belittling, addiction, and isolation reflect a contemporary wider notion of
“trauma culture,”18 the narrative workings in Let the Great World Spin are historically precise and
closer to LaCapra’s detailed psychoanalytic historicism. E. Ann Kaplan’s Trauma Culture is very precise in distinguishing a very few cultural texts as representing trauma in the correct medical, Freudian sense. The term “trauma culture” in popular use today references a much wider spectrum of cultural works conveying personal emotional pain. Kaplan uses the pejorative term “‘empty’ empathy” to designate the popular sentimental response to the abundant non-contextualized narratives about personal pain.19 Of course the popularity of Let the Great World Spin amongst a
non-specialized readership could be analyzed as “‘empty’ empathy” for down-and-out figures, in a wider “trauma culture” of chick flicks and urban crime shows.
LaCapra spells out the many ways in which actual traumatic memories inevitably resurface —in Gloria’s case, when activated by her white friend Claire from the bereaved mothers’ group treating her as black household help. After Claire “whispered: ‘You know, I’d be happy to pay you Gloria [to keep her company],’” the text shifts abruptly to Gloria’s memory: “MY GRANDMOTHER WAS a slave” (LGWS, 299, emphasis in original). Memory lapses of trauma are conjoined with the tendency compulsively to
repeat, relive, be possessed by, or act out traumatic scenes of the past, whether in more or less controlled artistic procedures [like the therapeutic bereavement group] or in uncontrolled existential experiences of hallucination, flashback, dream, and retraumatizing breakdown triggered by incidents that more or less obliquely recall the past. In this sense, what is denied or repressed in a lapse of memory does not disappear; it returns in a transformed, at times disfigured and disguised manner.20
Sparked by Gloria’s unwitting but diminishing remarks, Gloria leaves Claire’s apartment in indignation, but returns after she is robbed in the street. Claire then wants to re-engage a conversation about their deceased sons, but Gloria seems to be ready to move forward past her legacy of loss, even before she sees Jaslyn and Janice when Claire returns her to the Bronx housing complex after their visit. Visiting with Claire, Gloria “didn’t want to think about [her] boys anymore. In a strange way, all [she] wanted was to be surrounded by another, to be a part of somebody else’s room” (LGWS, 312). Being reduced to one’s trauma is limiting and blocks growth. That same evening Solomon had approached Gloria confusedly, also trying to appropriate her 18. E. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture: the Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 2005).
presence as that of a household worker; when Claire tells him his mistake privately, he then attempts to humanize Gloria (and himself) by speaking to their loss of sons. In this scene Gloria is most tactful and in control. When he returns to speak to Gloria, he says, “I’m sorry to hear about your sons,” and then he admits rarely, “I miss my boy too sometimes” (LGWS, 319).
Distributive Justice Reconsidered
The wire walker’s balancing pole could be compared to the one bearing the scales of justice. Indeed, the “Lady Justice in a blindfold” (LGWS, 248) is considered earlier by Soderberg in his personal accounting for the wire walker. By contrast to the Lady Justice whose blindfold is meant to convey impartiality or objectivity, Justice Soderberg’s nonchalance, egotistical designs and rulings offer up a lack of distributive justice. Grandmother Tillie Henderson is given an eight-months sentence for stealing from a client. Actually it is her daughter who is the guilty party, but Tillie— unbeknownst to the court, which is too rushed for time to seek the details—agrees to take “the fall” and go to prison so her daughter can go free. Meanwhile the funambulist wire walker pays what Soderberg imagines is a clever fine that will draw positive attention from the New York media the next day: “a penny per floor….a dollar ten,” Soderberg gloats [LGWS, 317]). Obviously this eight-years-after-“the event” novel casts its own (shadow of) judgment on an America oblivious to the plight of Others within and thus—by literary analogy—arguably also Others outside its borders, especially those impacted by its wars of retributive justice in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.
After Solomon’s death, Claire “had sold some of the other paintings—even her Miró, to help pay the expenses—but the Solomon portrait remained” (LGWS, 335). At his peak, Solomon recognized himself as “not the maverick Jew[ish lawyer] that he had once set out to be” (LGWS, 254), but rather as an elevated civil servant, ensuring “his quota” of cases was “filled. The heroes of the system were the judges who disposed of the most cases in the quickest amount of time” (LGWS, 257). Solomon was bored with his job and curious about the wire walker, who “looked like a small…version of Joshua, as if some brilliance had been deposited in his body, programmed in like one of Joshua’s hacks” (LGWS, 265). Lack of self-awareness and at depth social concern leads him in the mix of passing judgments to awarding Tillie Henderson’s eight-month sentence; followed by her being allowed a brief attendance at her daughter Jazzlyn’s funeral; her missing her grandchildren (Judge Soderberg will not guarantee that she will be placed and remain in New York city’s Rikers prison where she imagines they can visit her); and her isolation and ultimate suicide.
Judge Soderberg seems incapable of fundamental growth, and rarely alludes to his own suffering over his son’s death, though he often “weep[s]” in the bath “but only when the water was
running” (LGWS, 263) to keep his agony private from Claire. Gloria had also blocked her painful losses of family members and two messy divorces from her consciousness, but responded when young Janice “reached out to [her]” (LGWS, 322) on the day of Jazzlyn’s death. Although she may have avoided eye contact with their prostitute mother Jazzlyn in the elevator of the apartment building they shared, Gloria happens upon social workers taking the very small children away into protective care, and she intervenes. After Janice reached out to Gloria—when asked “‘You know these kids?’ said the cop” (LGWS, 322)—she said yes. In a transformative moment, issuing “as good a lie as any” (LGWS, 322), Gloria reawakens from deadening previous losses and through the alloyed truth of her lie takes a first step toward guardianship of the children.
Gloria’s powerful first-person account of her past establishes her family’s relationship to slavery and subsequent impoverishment that brought her to living amongst prostitutes and drug users in the mostly black housing complex; nonetheless she bears also her personal legacy of strength taken from this same past through her mother, who “wasn’t averse to thinking that a colored woman could get herself a better place in the world” (LGWS, 287). In this connection, Gloria embodies the burden of retrospectivity that Judge Soderberg’s court does not harbor. As mentioned earlier, the Judge’s shortsightedness toward Gloria and the past she represents is shown when at the end of his work day in the evening in his apartment he approaches Gloria who is visiting with his wife, and he treats her as a servant; he is especially “resent[ful]” of Gloria’s presence (LGWS, 317) as he wants to boast to Claire over what he sees as his masterfully creative sentencing of the wire walker (though he neglects to recall Tillie Henderson’s sentencing at all). Claire’s friendship with Gloria bespeaks their shared humanity. It was left for the women “to pick up the pieces” from the emotional fallout that Judge Soderberg and similarly minded institutional functionaries produce.
Gloria glimpses on her indignant walk from Claire’s apartment the novel’s feature of interconnectedness: “everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected” (LGWS, 306). The novel shows the subterranean world of the subway taggers in the same spirit as the wire walker’s, and transit readily moves people such as Gloria from the Bronx back to Manhattan where she reconciles with Claire. Gloria learns that insight gained from the past carries forward into the present and future —“Sometimes you’ve got to go up to a very high floor [hers previously, an eleventh floor apartment in the Bronx complex—or Claire’s penthouse domicile] to see what the past has done to the present” (LGWS, 306). Thus Let the Great World Spin deftly but subtly handles historical topics,
including 9-11 without ever mentioning the actual event.
Sandra Singer (PhD Cambridge) is associate professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies, University of Guelph, Canada (ssinger@uoguelph.ca). She recently published the co-edited text,
