ABSTRACT
As J. Nicholas Entrikin writes in the concluding lines of his introduction to The Betweenness of Place: Towards a Geography of Modernity: ‘To understand place requires that we have access to both an objective and a subjective reality,’ and he insists that ‘place is best viewed from points in between.’1 The ‘in-between’ nature of place in Colum McCann’s work is the object of the last chapter of the fourth section as McCann champions this specic mode of representation of space. Just as the exile is fundamentally between two countries, two territories, two cultures and often two languages, McCann’s characters are often in-between: in-between two towers, as in the case of Philippe Petit in Let the Great World Spin,2 or in-between two continents as the characters in TransAtlantic,3 and as before them, Conor in Songdogs,4 Rudolf Nureiev in Dancer5 or Zoli6 in the eponymous novel. More generally in-betweenness also informs his latest book Thirteen Ways of Looking.7 As the gure of the funambulist emphasises the vulnerability of this in-betweenness, it also highlights the impetus and the élan towards the future, asserting not so much the actual destination, as the journey itself and the essential meaning of the space in-between. McCann’s representations of space and time promote the space in-between as the place where his characters, whether exiles or contemporaries, can inhabit the present moment and skip or leap trustingly into the future. Dancing movements and dancing gestures are at the heart of McCann’s writing. Bodies express what words fail to say: not only the pain of nostalgia, but the yearning to live and the hope for better times and a more peaceful world. Finally, as McCann’s words embody the skipping and hopping of the characters in his latest works, as in the short story ‘Aisling’8 for example, place seems to have set anchor in language itself – in the words, pace, tempo but also in the breathing and sometimes the breathtaking trepidation of never-ending sentences. Place is in the gasp-like panting of the reader as he reads on, in the interstices between words, as well as in the sighs of comfort and hope on which the short story ends. The very act of reading becomes an act of ‘radical empathy,’9 to use one of McCann’s favourite phrases, by which the reader espouses place as the present moment embodied in a ery élan towards the future, a place of meetings and relationships.
