Literary Geographies

Narrative Space in Let The Great World Spin

Sheila Hones
ISBN: 9781137413130
DOI: 10.1057/9781137413130
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Literary Geographies

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 Literary Geographies
Narrative Space in Let the Great World Spin

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Sheila Hones

10.1057/9781137413130 - Literary Geographies, Sheila Hones

literary geographies
Copyright © Sheila Hones, 2014

All rights reserved.

First published in 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the

United States—­a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth
Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

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ISBN: 978-1-137-41312-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Hones, Sheila.
Literary geographies : narrative space in Let the great world spin /
Sheila Hones.
pages cm
ISBN 978-­1-­137-­41312-­3 (hardback : alk. paper)
1. McCann, Colum, 1965–­Let the great world spin. 2. Space and
time in literature. 3. Narration (Rhetoric) 4. Intertextuality. I. Title.

PR6063.C335Z69 2014
823'.914—­dc23 2014004125

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Scribe Inc.

First edition: August 2014

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

10.1057/9781137413130 - Literary Geographies, Sheila Hones

 Contents

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Acknowledgments vii
1 Introduction 1
2 The Event of the Novel 19
3 Narrative Locations 35
4 The Great World’s New York 51
5 Narrative Space 69
6 Distances 85
7 The Intertextual City 101
8 Literary Space 115
9 Geographies of Creation and Promotion 129
10 Geographies of Reception 145
11 Conclusion: What Happens Next? 163
Notes 183
Bibliography 201
Index 211

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 Acknowledgments

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As this work is a revised and expanded version of a manuscript writ-
ten for Tokyo University Press, I would first like to thank my edi-
tor at TUP, Kensuke Goto, and our translator, Eimi Ozawa. I would
also like to acknowledge the practical and financial support of Tokyo
University Press and the University of Tokyo’s Center for Pacific and
American Studies.
At Palgrave Macmillan, I would like to thank Brigitte Shull, Ryan
Jenkins, and the editorial and production teams.
The generous support of colleagues, staff, and graduate students at
the University of Tokyo, in particular in the Department of Area Stud-
ies and in the English teaching section, has been vital to this project,
and I am especially grateful to my colleagues in North American stud-
ies: Masako Notoji, Yasuo Endo, Fumiko Nishizaki, Yujin Yaguchi,
and Kenryu Hashikawa. Other Tokyo colleagues I would like to thank
include Izumi Hirobe, Shoko Imai, Julia Leyda, Masami Nakao, Nao
Nomura, and Hatsue Shinohara; among colleagues elsewhere, I am
particularly grateful to Michele Acuto, Mike Crang, James Kneale,
and Angharad Saunders. Richard Carter-­White heroically read and
commented on both versions of the manuscript.
Personal friends-­and-­family thanks go especially to GHH and the
Hones, Freegard, and Common families, to Jane and Phil Blake, Clive
Collins, Dexter Da Silva, Caroline Kuroda, Graham Law, Allan Morrison,
Tony Mills, Marie Plasse, Amanda Shepherd, and the inspiring Bill Vance.
Finally, the always cheerful practical and moral support of my friends
Yujin and Caroline kept this book alive, as did the care and support
I have received (and continue to receive) from medical professionals
in Japan and the United Kingdom. I would like to thank Dr. Taiyo
Kikuchi and the staff at the Mitakanomori Clinic in Tokyo, as well as
Maggie Warth and the satellite unit staff at the Royal United Hospital
Bath. Finally, I would like to thank my specialist at the Okubo Hos-
pital in Tokyo, Dr. Sachiko Wakai, and her colleagues Dr. Yasutomo
Abe, Dr. Ari Shimizu (now at Tokyo Women’s Medical University),
Dr. Hirofumi Tanii, Dr. Koji Yonekura, and the whole hospital staff.

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 Chapter 1

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Introduction

I t’s early in the morning on Wednesday, August 7, 1974, and com-

muters 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, revolv-
ing doors revolving. Gradually, in the midst of the sound and the traf-
fic, 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

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2 Literary Geographies

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

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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 per-
formance 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 signif-
icance. 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 rekin-
dled 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 K ey E l ements
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 collab-
oration in artistic and academic performance, and (3) interdisciplinary

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 Introduction 3

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.

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The first reason, then, that this study opens with a narrative ver-
sion 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 read-
ing but also in terms of promotion and popular reader reception. And
because this study also considers the geographies of the author’s pub-
lic 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 collabo-
rators. 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;

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4 Literary Geographies

he needed to learn from experts; he needed collaborators and an audi-

ence. 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 him-
self 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 infor-

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mants (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 interdis-
ciplinarity, like Petit’s performance and McCann’s novel, inherently
collaborative, it is also, in a sense, an academic version of Petit’s adven-
ture 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 tow-
ers, 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 tight-
rope [as they] accidentally dovetail in and out of each other’s lives

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 Introduction 5

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

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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 addi-
tion, 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 con-
nect. 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 cre-
ated 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 disas-
ter 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 Man-
hattan’s downtown business district. McCann creates a very different
setting for the event he wants to place in the gap that was made when

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6 Literary Geographies

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

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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.

Co l l abo r atio n
Central to this book is the concept of an artistic performance or pro-
duction as an event, something that happens—­and keeps on happen-
ing—­in space as well as time. It comes into being and then continues
to unfold not only in the creation of an original performance (wire-
walking, for example, or writing fiction) but also in subsequent view-
ings, 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 intersec-
tion 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

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 Introduction 7

ebooks—­of the various editions of The Great World can be purchased

in bookstores or online or borrowed from libraries and friends; indi-
viduals 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 writ-
ing and your reading interact in space and time: we are engaged in

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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 mul-
tiple 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 collabo-
ration 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 com-
munities and disparate specialist competencies, and by a vast range of
historical contexts and local conditions.

I nterd i s c ipl inary Liter ary Geog raphy

The discussion of Colum McCann’s The Great World that follows is
offered as an example of one kind of interdisciplinary literary geog-
raphy at work, attempting to connect theory and method in literary
studies with theory and method in cultural geography.15 The difficul-
ties 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 geography (the world and the
study of that world) become reduced to the status of subject matter,
theme, or raw data. In order to achieve this interdisciplinary balance,

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8 Literary Geographies

literary geography has to go beyond the literary analysis of geographi-

cal themes or the geographical analysis of literary texts. Literature
and geography have to function as a combined double subject, on the
one hand, and a combined, double, theoretical, and methodological
framework, on the other. This means, to take a practical example,
that apparently simple and self-­evident terms such as space or reader
have to be carefully used, bearing in mind the various ways in which

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the meanings of these terms have been debated and negotiated in
academic discourse. A literary critic might well use the term space as
if its meaning is self-­evident; a cultural geographer probably would
not. Meanwhile, a cultural geographer might well refer to the reader
as if that concept, too, were unproblematic; a literary scholar working
in reception studies probably would not. What this means is that a
work located between these two disciplines has to pay close attention
to the academic version of what for Petit were his “cavaletti”—­his
anchor ropes. Further, just as Petit was challenged by destabilizing
gusts, updrafts, and downdrafts, studies in interdisciplinary literary
geography will inevitably have some difficulty maintaining their bal-
ance in the crosswinds of literary and spatial theory.
Nonetheless, while it is at times difficult to reconcile these two the-
oretical specializations in the practice of literary geography, there are
lines that can be thrown between the two. The primary line established
in this study connecting literary and spatial theory is anchored at one
end in a view of geographical space as “the product of interrelations,”
as a dimension of multiplicity and plurality, as always unfinished and
under construction, and at the other end in a comparably spatial view
of the literary text, as the result of interaction and the product of multi-
plicity, as permanently in a state of production.17 This interdisciplinary
connection suggests at least three kinds of space for literary geography
to consider. There is the fictional space generated in the event of the
text: in this case, the geography of The Great World, its locations,
distances, and networks. Then there is the “unending library” of inter-
textual literary space: in this case, the uncontained intertextual space
that opens out from The Great World with every quotation McCann
includes and every literary reverberation the reader senses. And then
there is the sociospatial dimension of the collaboration of author,
editor, publisher, critic, and reader without which reading (and thus
text) could not happen: this is the interaction to which McCann refers
in his remark that a novel “is completed only when it is finished by
a reader.” At least these three kinds of literary-­geographical space,
then, become visible in a version of literary geography that regards the
various spaces of narrative, intertextuality, production, and reception

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 Introduction 9

as simultaneously and equally literary and geographical. And for all

this to work, space—­whether geographical, narrative, or literary—­has
to be understood not as a fixed and measurable frame within which
action takes place but rather as the product of action: an active dimen-
sion of interrelations, intertextualities, and multiplicity.
Working in this way, from an understanding of literary-­geographical
space made possible by the work of geographers and spatial theorists—­

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such as Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Edward Soja, and Doreen
Massey—­and by the work of literary critics and cultural theorists—­
such as M. M. Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, and Julia Kristeva—­ this
study of the literary geographies of The Great World assumes that the
literary-­geographical space in which fiction happens is a real space. It
is real in the same way that Soja’s simultaneously material and sym-
bolic “third space” is real or that intertextuality as “as a space in which
a vast number of relations coalesce” is real.18 The New York of The
Great World happens in readings as a third space, a flexible space, an
unruly space-­time, composed of multiple mixed-­together New York
geographies—­ material, described, and imagined—­ brought to the
event of the text by author and reader. At the same time, The Great
World is itself a coming-­together of literary allusion and resonance, a
nexus in intertextual space-­time. And finally the literary-­geographical
space practiced by the author, text, and reader in the event of The
Great World is simultaneously substantial and intangible, measurable
and mobile.
It is at this point that this line in literary geography diverges from
the narratological position that in “speaking of space in narratology
and other fields, a distinction should be made between literal and
metaphorical uses of the concept.”19 The kind of literary geography
practiced in this study of the geographies of McCann’s novel under-
stands “literal” space to include not only the container space that
depends on a fixed system of coordinates but also all kinds of rela-
tional and social space, taken to be equally literal and equally real.
As a result, whereas the literal/metaphorical binary currently means
for mainstream narratology that “author-­ reader relations, literary-­
historical considerations, and intertextual allusions are metaphorical
because they fail to account for physical existence,” all these aspects
of literary space are accorded equal status as real in this study. In this
view, the New York City of The Great World is no more literal a space
than the socioliterary space produced by the interaction of McCann
and his readers in the event of the novel.
In its understanding of textual space as a real space, this version of
literary geography also reaches back to Joseph Frank’s idea of spatial

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10 Literary Geographies

form, regarding narrative spatiality not as a “structural metaphor” but

as something much more literal—­not taking it as an attempt to elimi-
nate the temporal organization of fictional narrative but instead, more
positively, as part of indivisible narrative space-­time. The fact that the
recognition of spatial form in fiction depends on the contribution of
the reader is sometimes taken as evidence of its secondary position,
but this is not an issue for a literary geography that refuses to sepa-

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rate time from space and understands the text as a sociospatial event
generated in author-­text-­reader interaction. This position removes the
need for the qualification included in the entry on spatial form in
the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, for example, when
it notes that “spatial form possesses an underlying coherence based
on thematic analogies . . . and associative cross-­references, but this
coherence must be established by the reader.”20 The significant “but”
in this explanation, which sustains the dominance of temporal over
spatial organization for narrative theory, disappears in a literary geog-
raphy for which text happens in interaction.
The separation of space and time and the assumption that “simul-
taneity” is a function of time and not space leads to a second doubt
about the idea of spatial form in fiction that can be discounted in an
approach to literary geography grounded in an understanding of space
as “a simultaneity of stories-­so-­far.”21 This is the doubt expressed in
the explanation that “Joseph Frank famously postulated that modern-
ist literature had a ‘spatial form,’ although his understanding of space
was largely limited to a temporal characteristic, simultaneity.”22 In this
view, spatial form is the “artificial” result of the author’s organization
of the narrative and the demands it makes on the reader: “Simultane-
ity or spatiality is artificially imposed by the author’s decision to break
the linear narrative into fragments,” which require the reader to “proj-
ect a kind of spatial mental image as they put these pieces together.”
As a result, in this view of spatial form, the spatialization effected by
narrative fragmentation “might be considered an allegorical process”
requiring the reader to “project a mental image, not unlike a map, in
order to grasp the narrative.”23 However, this kind of deprecation of
spatial form as merely metaphorical or allegorical, in contrast with the
seemingly more literal temporal form of the novel, becomes unneces-
sary in a literary geography that takes the participation of the reader
in the text event for granted, regards the process of mental mapping
not as something allegorical but as an essential element in the produc-
tion of space, and, most importantly, understands simultaneity not
as a “temporal characteristic” but as something thoroughly spatial.
This accords with the view of Doreen Massey, for whom space can

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 Introduction 11

be defined as the sphere of a dynamic “contemporaneous plural-

ity,” something far more complex and interesting than “a static slice
through time.”24
The literary geography practiced in this study is made up, then,
of a combination of ideas about geographical space and ideas about
literary space, all of which reject the idea that the only kind of real
space is the measurable space of a container, or a setting. These two

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ways of thinking about space, geographical and literary, converge in
a literary geography that regards texts as events that happen in the
course of sociospatial and intertextual interactions. This way of think-
ing about fiction—­taking the novel as a spatial event—­is explained in
more detail in Chapter 2, which follows from and builds on this chap-
ter’s introduction of the study’s three key elements: (1) the case study
novel, (2) the importance of collaboration in artistic and academic
production, and (3) the definition of a particular kind of interdisci-
plinary literary geography.

Chapter Outl ine

After the introductory setup of Chapters 1 and 2, Chapters 3 and
4 begin the analysis of the literary-­geographical spaces of The Great
World with a relatively conventional summary of the novel’s use of set-
ting, description, and narrative locations. While Chapters 3 and 4 both
deal with questions of space and place, Chapter 3 does so in a manner
that is able to remain relatively compatible with a view of space as a
set of locations, measurable distances, and containers, while Chapter
4 begins the move toward an alternative view of the novel’s narrative
space as something flexible and unstable, something that is in constant
process throughout the novel: not so much a space that frames action
as a space generated through action. The transition from Chapter 3
to Chapter 4 thus replicates the move in human geography from a
view of space as something natural, which precedes social activity, to a
relational view “in which space is ‘folded into’ social relations through
practical activities.” This is the transition from a geography for which
space is “an external coordinate, an empty grid of mutually exclusive
points, ‘an unchanging box’” within which objects exist and events
occur, into a geography for which space and time are not separate, not
neutral, and not external to social activity, in which space is practiced
rather than inhabited.25
Chapters 5 and 6 move away from questions of place and space as
they relate to the novel’s New York City setting to turn instead toward
the more general question of narrative space. Chapter 5 begins with

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12 Literary Geographies

an exploration of the ways in which different understandings of the

nature of space generate different and often incompatible ways of ana-
lyzing narrative space in fiction, reviewing the development of ideas
about narrative space in literary geography as a subfield of human
geography and taking the very different current positions on the ques-
tion of narrative space in narratology and literary geography as two
extremes. After this introductory review section on the idea of narra-

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tive space, the chapter moves on to an analysis of the ways in which
the narrative space of The Great World is presented to the reader via
the manipulation of style and structure. The main argument here is
that McCann achieves spatial and narrative coherence for his novel
by creating a fictional location that is characterized by two apparently
contradictory spatial aspects: this is a place built up out of separate
layers, but these layers are shot through and connected, even folded
together like crumpled paper, by links that function like narrative
wormholes—­ hypothetical “short cuts” through space-­ time, acting
as tunnels that have their entry and exit points in otherwise uncon-
nected, vastly different locations. Here the question of spatial form is
revisited with the proposition that temporal sequence and spatial form
are not in competition in the organization of The Great World but
rather that the novel happens, as it is read, in an integrated space-­time.
Chapter 6 focuses on the novel’s geographies of networks, distance,
and technologically mediated “code-­space.” The chapter begins with
a brief review of the concept of the “network” in English-­language
geography and spatial theory and then considers three examples of
significant networks in the novel and the ways in which they generate
narrative space. It then turns to a consideration of distance, specifically
the ways in which instances of literal distance paired with relational
proximity and relational distance paired with literal proximity function
to generate a flexible narrative space in the novel. The final section of
the chapter takes a closer look at the role of technology in the creation
of connections across distance, which is to say, its establishment of
relational proximity in the context of physical distance. The space-­
generating aspects of new types of hardware/software combinations
are noted not only as they literally produce new kinds of space in the
novel’s “narrative universe” (to use a narratological term) but also as
they function in the production of narrative space in the novel.
Chapter 7 widens the focus from narrative space to the concept
of literary space more generally, thereby swerving fully away from
the narratological line to insist that in the context of a geographi-
cal understanding of space, the concept of “literary space” does not
have to be “metaphorical.” Here the approach to literary space is

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 Introduction 13

made by concentrating on issues of intertextuality: this chapter shows

how the intertextual references to other New York novels mean that
many fictional and factual New Yorks are copresent in the text event
of The Great World. In other words, this chapter expands the dis-
cussion of The Great World’s literary geography by moving from the
intratextual—­the coherence and connectedness of the space of the
fictional world—­to the intertextual and the extratextual, and the con-

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nectedness not only of literary space but also of literary and material
space. In this way, it collapses the literal-­metaphorical space binary
and reorganizes it into a version of what the geographer Ed Soja has
termed third space. This chapter takes hold of a third space made up
of both actual and imagined elements as a way of thinking about the
mixed-­together, many-­New-­Yorks aspect of the novel’s fictional set-
ting. Here the chapter pushes the conventional understanding of
literary setting as a blend of the real and the imagined a little further,
by incorporating the dimension of intertextuality and thereby sug-
gesting that in the event of the novel the inclusion of references and
links to other texts, and the ability of readers to notice those connec-
tions, complicates the notion of setting even more. The second half of
Chapter 7 turns to a consideration of intertextuality in relation to plot
events and narrative style. The reading presented here is inflected by
association with two genres of texts: (1) memoirs and representations
of Petit’s 1974 wirewalk and (2) a small group of other well-­known
“New York novels.” A section on fictional car crashes takes one exam-
ple of a generic plot event that can be traced across several of these
“New York novels,” the argument here being that for a reader familiar
with this group of novels, the repeated, recognizably similar car crash
incidents will create a spatial sense of separate worlds coinciding or
merging.
Chapter 8 broadens the discussion of the book from the narrative
space specific to The Great World and the exploration of one particu-
lar line in literary geography to consider literary and academic space
more generally. Expanding on the idea that many readers of The Great
World will be exposed to multiple simultaneous New Yorks, as this
text connects in their mind with other texts (and other New Yorks),
this chapter explores the ways in which intertextuality forms part of
the practice of social space more generally. It argues that the liter-
ary geography of The Great World can be understood to include not
only representations of a fictional setting and of spatialities of distance
and networks but also representations of the ways in which fictional
and actual geographies come together in the practices of daily life.
This proposal is first made through a close reading of the chapter “A

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14 Literary Geographies

Fear of Love” in order to show how one of the characters inside the
world of the text experiences her own surroundings and organizes the
events of her life by reference to another fictional world, specifically
the 1920s New York–­Long Island world of The Great Gatsby. The
chapter concludes with a discussion of intertextual space more gener-
ally and the ways in which equally real dimensions of literary, social,
and material space come together in the spatial practice of daily life.

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Chapters 9 and 10 continue this turn toward a broader textual
space and the consideration of spatial practice, focusing on the geog-
raphies of inspiration, creation, production, promotion, and reception
connected with The Great World. Chapter 9 concentrates on the
author figure, “Colum McCann,” taking the position that because
most of the accessible information about the inspiration, creation, and
production of The Great World is available through practices relating
to promotion, this means that what is publicly known about Colum
McCann (in terms of his working practice and the production of his
texts) has to be understood as a text event in itself. Thus the subject
for this chapter on geographies of inspiration, creation, and produc-
tion is not so much the historical living author himself as it is an author
figure emerging out of a collection of texts, videos, and performances,
all of which are part of the process of promotion. This chapter deals
with the work as commodity, up to a certain point following the argu-
ment that “the name of the author”—­the author figure, in this case,
“Colum McCann”—­“allows the work to be an item of exchange
value,” fostering a view of reading as consumption: the author “places
meaning in the text,” and the reader “consumes that meaning.” As
Barthes points out in making this argument, this view of the work as
commodity produces a space-­time in which the author figure has to
be “the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically
on a single line divided into a before and an after.”26 This idea of the
before-­and-­after of the text as a commodity is thought through in
Chapter 9 not only in light of the contemporary promotional prac-
tices that have produced and continue to produce the novel Let the
Great World Spin but also in light of what McCann has said about
his interest in his readers and his willingness to hand his novel over
to those readers for completion—­his position that The Great World
offers readers a liminal zone into which they enter “carrying their own
thoughts” and ready to “participate in a conversation.”27
Chapter 10 continues this interest in readers and the geographies
of reception but begins by demonstrating the difficulties of separating
production and reception with an introductory section looking at the
ways in which various forms of reader response to the text have been

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 Introduction 15

(and are being) incorporated into the processes of marketing. The

chapter then engages with the spatiality of reception, showing how
reception involves not only geographies of location—­for example,
which formats and which versions (e.g., translations) are sold in which
locations and how the book is reviewed differently in various publica-
tion locales—­but also a more relational geography of reception that
includes the spatiality of reader interactions, which itself will include

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both the microgeography of book groups whose members meet face-­
to-­face for discussion and the much more dispersed online geography
of Internet book discussion groups. This chapter also returns to
McCann’s belief that a novel “is completed only when it is finished by
a reader,” considering what happens when a resistant reader refuses to
contribute such a completion.
The final chapter offers anticipations rather than conclusions, ask-
ing three questions: (1) what happens next for literary geography?
(2) what happens next with The Great World? and (3) what happens
next for the text event of this study? The first question provokes the
most extensive and personal response, based on the idea that the geog-
raphy of literary geography can be usefully understood not only with
regard to the literal location of scholars, projects, and publications
but also as a set of sociospatial practices that generate an academic
geography equally textual and material, marked by interrelations,
intertextualities, gaps, and absences, and always under construction.
This reflection on the geography of literary geography thus returns
to the theme of intertextuality taken up in the previous chapter to
explore the idea of a space in which intertextuality “is not a means
by which we can link one textual space with another, or move from
one to another, but is itself a part of that space, is, in fact, the whole
of that space.”28 Moving from fiction to academic practice and the
geography of literary geography, the chapter argues that academic
writing itself folds “the whole” of academic space in particular ways
and that as a result, the relationship connecting an academic work to
academic space can be grasped in comparable ways to the relation-
ship connecting a novel to literary space in general. What this implies
is that the geography of literary geography, the academic space of
literary geography, needs to be understood not only with regard to
the literal location of scholars, projects, and publications but also as
a set of social practices that inhabit and produce a kind of real-­and-­
imagined third space marked by interrelations and intertextualities,
links and gaps, juxtapositions and absences, always under construction
and susceptible to intervention.

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16 Literary Geographies

The second and third “what next” questions are dealt with more
succinctly: with regard to The Great World, the final chapter briefly
discusses the May 2013 publication of McCann’s next novel Trans-
Atlantic, noting how this development has added a new dimension
and a new set of relations to the geography of The Great World and
suggesting some aspects of the significance of this expansion for the
continuing event of the earlier novel. Then finally, the very last section

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of the concluding chapter returns to the idea that this book is itself
a collaborative event that depends not only on energies contributed
from the production side but also on energies contributed by readers.
So the last sentence of the forward-­looking conclusion speaks directly
to the readers who will complete this study in multiple unpredictable
ways.

Co nc lusio n
As the preceding brief summary of this study should indicate, the
main purpose here is not to provide an interpretation or a discussion
of a particular novel. While the study inevitably functions to some
extent as an introduction to McCann’s The Great World, it does not
approach this material from the perspective of literary criticism but
instead engages with the novel as a case study example enabling the
exploratory practice of methods in literary geography. In other words,
the intent here is to create a broad picture of one part of the range
of possible practices in literary geographies associated with a critically
acclaimed and also popular novel and its associated networks of pro-
duction and reception.
As the earlier sections dealing with the difficulties of shared termi-
nology and differing assumptions in the study of space and literature
would suggest, its interdisciplinarity is far from evenhanded. But while
it leans more in some directions than others—­toward spatial theory,
for example, cultural geography and the idea of intertextuality as a
form of literary spatiality—­it does make some effort to acknowledge
the existence (and inevitable influence) of those other directions, their
assumptions and concerns. Perhaps most obviously, this study leans
toward cultural geography rather than literary studies because its pri-
mary interest is in working with The Great World as a case study in
the exploration of theory and method in cultural geography. Where
a more literary approach to literary geography might turn to spatial
theory to enhance the interpretation of the work and facilitate the
development of literary criticism and theory, the more geographical
approach taken here is primarily interested in understanding how the

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 Introduction 17

text event of The Great World articulates and participates in the pro-
duction of various kinds of space.29
At the heart of this study, then, is the literary-­geographical idea that
the text is “a multidimensional space” in which not only “a variety of
writings” but also a variety of geographies “blend and clash.”30 In
this sense, it expands the multidimensional space of Barthes’s literary
intertextuality into a more inclusive interspatiality, bringing together

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a literary rejection of the idea of the text as a container with a geo-
graphical rejection of the idea that space can be sufficiently defined as
a box within which things happen and places can be located.31 This
understanding of literary space makes it possible to reconcile literary
theory and spatial theory in a literary geography grounded in a view of
textual space as a social space, a combination of an “unending library”
made up of “a network of intersecting lines, a nexus of repeated
points without a beginning and without an end” and a geographical
space that results from “relations between, relations which are neces-
sarily embedded in material practices which have to be carried out,”
thus “always in the process of being made . . . never finished; never
closed.”32 This is why the literary geography of The Great World can
be read in at least these three ways: (1) as a representation of a par-
ticular articulation of space, (2) as an event happening in intertextual
literary space, and (3) as something that emerges in the unpredict-
able spatial interaction of various collaborating agents. And at this
moment, the primary interaction is ours—­mine and yours—­as you
read this book into being.

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 Chapter 2

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The Event of the Novel

A s the preceding chapter briefly explained, the conceptual platform

supporting this exploration in literary geography is the idea that a
work happens in the course of intermingled processes of writing, pub-
lishing, and reading and that as a result, because this intermingling
is inevitably spatial, the work as it emerges can be understood as a
geographical event, or a series of connected events, which have been
unfolding (and continue to unfold) in space and time. As a result, this
study of McCann’s novel is not only about the spatiality of The Great
World but also a part of that spatiality. It further means that this book
about literary geography, itself a written-­ and-­
read work emerging
through spatial processes of production and reception, is a geographi-
cal event with extensions in time and space.
There are, of course, many approaches to literary geography
broadly defined, some so termed—­as literary geography—­and others
categorized differently, and the ongoing historical geography of this
range of practices is discussed in detail in Chapter 11, which reflects
on this work and the ways in which it inhabits and folds academic
space. Here in this second introductory chapter, however, the empha-
sis is on the ways in which this study of the spatiality of The Great
World emerges from one particular tradition in literary-­geographical
studies, a primarily UK-­based, English-­language tradition in literary
geography that is concerned with the ways in which narrative writes
space, the ways in which fiction happens in literary space, and the ways
in which fiction happens in material and social space.1
The close reading of the novel undertaken in the next five chap-
ters is intended to function as an experimental case study: in other
words, it is focused only incidentally on this particular text and more

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20 Literary Geographies

generally on theory and practice in literary geography. This study is

not, as a result, primarily intended as a work of literary criticism or
interpretation, and the analysis of space in relation to this novel is not
primarily directed toward McCann’s narrative representation of New
York City. So the major question here is not “how can McCann’s
novel be mapped in relation to the known world?” or “how accurate
is McCann’s portrayal of New York in the 1970s?” or even “how does

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McCann create his setting, and how does it function in the narra-
tive?” Instead the basic question is this: how can McCann’s novel—­as
a work of art, a story, an artifact, a product—­be understood as a spatial
event, and what might such an understanding contribute to work in
cultural geography and literary studies more generally?

L i ter a ry Studies in Cultur al Geography

In its earliest stages, English-­language literary geography in the human
geography tradition was primarily concerned with description. Geog-
raphers looked to fiction—­particularly fiction in the realist mode—­for
useful accounts of places, landscapes, and regions and for exemplary
models of descriptive geographical writing. It was not until the emer-
gence of humanistic geography in the 1970s, however, that literary
geography could be said to constitute an independent subfield of
human geography. The first bibliographies and review essays dealing
explicitly with literary geography started to appear in the early 1980s,
with R. C. Dhussa’s “Literary Geography: A Bibliography” and D. C.
D. Pocock’s monograph Humanistic Geography and Literature both
being published in 1981. By the mid-­1980s, both the aims and the
practice of literary geography had become the subject of debate within
human geography, with John Silk arguing in “Beyond Geography and
Literature,” for example, that “current work on geography and lit-
erature” derived from unexamined assumptions and defined the idea
of the literary too narrowly. The following year, in “Literature and
Humanist Geography,” J. Douglas Porteous also argued—­although
from a humanist rather than Marxist standpoint—­that work in literary
geography was too narrowly focused on case studies of nineteenth-­
century realist depictions of the rural, suggesting a more conceptual
framework for future work in the field. The humanistic geography
of the 1980s was particularly interested in the human perception of
the environment and the significance of cultural and personal mean-
ing for the idea of place. The emergence of literary geography as a
geographical subfield was further confirmed by the publication of two
collections: William Mallory and Paul Simpson-­Housley’s Geography

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 The Event of the Novel 21

and Literature in 1987 and a 1988 special section of The Canadian

Geographer, “Focus: Literary Landscapes,” edited by L. Anders Sand-
berg and John Marsh.
In these early phases of geography’s literary geography, the inter-
disciplinary combination was generally understood to involve the
application of geographical interests and methods to literary subject
matter; in other words, the tendency was to regard literary criticism

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as a “complementary field,” and the extent of the interdisciplinar-
ity was limited to common primary materials. In this context, the
appearance of Marc Brosseau’s 1994 review essay, “Geography’s
Literature,” in Progress in Human Geography marks an important
moment in the development of geographical literary geography for
two reasons. First, although his paper was a review of mainly English-­
language work produced and published in the context of human
geography, it was based on his doctoral research at the Université de
Paris-­Sorbonne; “Geography’s Literature” thus represents an impor-
tant first step toward the expansion of literary geography beyond its
English-­ language and often UK-­ based context, an expansion that
the bilingual (French and English) Canadian Brosseau, working and
publishing in both languages, has enabled throughout his career. The
second reason Brosseau’s 1994 paper marks a particularly important
moment for literary geography is that it made such a vigorous critique
of the literary geography current at the time, not only questioning the
conventional geographical practice of taking description in realist fic-
tion as a reliable historical source but also pointing out the limitations
of the move within humanistic geography to focus on the author as a
privileged interpreter of what was frequently and reductively assumed
to be a universal experience of landscape and place. Brosseau argued
convincingly for a reinvention of literary geography that would enable
a shift in focus, not only expanding the field beyond discussions of
setting and description but also initiating a move away from a con-
centration on the author. Calling for a more intense analysis of style
and a close-­reading approach informed by techniques of literary criti-
cism, Brosseau set out to highlight the ways in which “the literary
text may constitute a ‘geographer’ in its own right as it generates
norms, particular modes of readability, that produce a particular kind
of geography.”2
Brosseau’s call for a much greater focus on “the text itself” is par-
ticularly important for this study because it drew attention to the ways
in which agency had conventionally been distributed in the reading
process. In “Geography’s Literature,” Brosseau argued for less atten-
tion to be paid to the author and more agency to be accorded to

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22 Literary Geographies

the literary work itself—­“how it defines its reader, how it creates an

‘eye.’”3 A few years later, in a 1999 essay on the geography of sci-
ence fiction, James Kneale further complicated the question of agency
within literary geography by emphasizing the way in which literary
works only become activated in the context of a “relationship which
joins authors, texts and readers.”4 As work in reader-­response criticism
was also suggesting at the time, text and reader together produce the

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event of the novel.5 The question of agency for English-­language liter-
ary geographers in this way became gradually more nuanced and more
interesting in the 1990s: originally focused on the author, it came
to include the text and then, somewhat later, the reader. In a paper
published in Area in 2000, for example, Joanne Sharp expanded the
concept of “the reader” to include a wider range of positions: not just
“the reader” of informed academic literary analysis but also the many
nonprofessional readers engaging with the novel as fictional entertain-
ment.6 Even more recently, as exemplified by the 2008 publication of
the review article “Text As It Happens” in Geography Compass, literary
geography within English-­language cultural geography has further
come to look at the literary work as a process that cannot be unprob-
lematically divided between various participating agents (author, text,
reader/s) but rather as something that has to be understood in terms
of a dynamic interaction, a process of engagement through which fic-
tion becomes regenerated and renegotiated in the process of being
collaboratively written, published, distributed, read, and discussed.7

Agenc y
It is the overall aim of this study to engage with this complex and col-
laborative literary geography and contribute to this collective line of
work, to think of The Great World as an ongoing event emerging out
of multiple interactions and negotiations connecting different kinds
of space and distance. This approach to literary geography, and thus
to the case study text, rests on a definition of textual meaning as the
result of negotiation—­the product of interaction—­a definition that
makes it interestingly difficult to locate meaning and assign agency in
any precise sense. It becomes problematic, in other words, to locate
fictional meaning in the intentions of the author, in the words on the
page, or in the interpretations produced by readers: meaning has to
be understood instead as something always emerging unpredictably in
the interaction of these various agents.
An approach to literary meaning that emphasizes how it emerges
in the course of interaction involving a range of agents inevitably

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 The Event of the Novel 23

produces a problem for methodology. While literary scholars have

acknowledged the need to recognize the various agencies of author,
text, and reader, there has been some difficulty in realizing this rec-
ognition in practical analysis. Reader-­ response theorists Patrocinio
Schweickart and Elizabeth Flynn admit, for example, that too great
an emphasis on the reader obscures “the significance of the text and
the creative agency of the author,” while too great an emphasis on

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the structuring effects of the text tends “to efface the agency of the
reader.” Nevertheless, they go on to note that in actual practice, “the
idea of reading as an interaction between two different entities” is dif-
ficult to maintain.8
This is an area of difficulty in which spatial theory becomes usefully
relevant to method in literary geography because it suggests ways in
which the multiple interactions between author, text, and reader can
be grasped as a subject for discussion and analysis. If fiction happens
when it is read and if, as a result, it involves an interaction between
author, text, and audience, then (because it is an interaction) it can be
understood as an inherently spatial practice. Any kind of interaction
involves relationships across distance, whether that distance is physical
or relational, small or large.9 It is in this sense that space is necessary
to fiction. Space, in other words, is the dimension that renders fiction
possible. And this suggests that the kind of spatial theory developed
by social and cultural geographers to talk about interactions across
various kinds of distance can provide us with the vocabulary needed
to talk about the interaction of the author, text, and reader and their
essentially collaborative agency in bringing about the event of fiction.

The Autho r
It is not, however, simply a matter of a text event involving multiple
agents, including but not limited to the author, the work, and the
reader. If the basic view of literary meaning as the product of interac-
tion between agents distributed in space and time is accepted, then
the next step is to deal with the fact that each of these agents is in itself
internally multiple and unstable. Take, for example, “the author.” The
geographer Ian Cook, reflecting on his own positionality as author,
makes the point that “the author” is anything but a stable entity, as he
addresses the reader directly: “So what do you think is going on in the
relationship between my writing and your reading? Are ‘we’/‘they’
getting on OK? But, please don’t think that you now know ‘me’ really
well . . . Please note that I make no claim that I will be the same by the
time this book is published, anyway. I wholeheartedly subscribe to the

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24 Literary Geographies

view that people are processes, not things. I will have changed. I am
bound to.”10 Significantly, Cook sometimes attributes work of his own
that would conventionally be understood to have been single authored
to “Cook et al.” in order to highlight his ambivalence about the very
idea of single authorship. Cook emphasizes that in some aspects all
written work is coauthored, whether the collaboration comes in the
form of texts the author has read, conversations the author has had,

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lectures he or she has attended, or—­more concretely—­from edito-
rial input, peer review comments, proofreaders, and publishers. Nigel
Thrift connects this way of thinking about authorship to nonrepre-
sentational theory, noting that one of its “banal but still important
principles . . . is that all work is joint: the idea that such a thing as a
single author is there to be named is faintly ludicrous.” Instead Thrift
argues, “All books seem to me to be . . . full to the brim with the
thoughts of a host of others, alive and dead.”11
Colum McCann, “the author” of The Great World, is equally
unfixed, first in the sense that the authorial consciousness working the
novel’s narrative voices needs to be distinguished from the historical
person who lives with his family in New York City. This distinction is
of course complicated by paratextual elements such as the 2008 video
recording made at the European Graduate School in Switzerland in
which McCann reads aloud from the novel, thus merging the voice of
the text with the voice of the person.12 And to complicate the merging
of these multiple authorial presences even further, McCann has sug-
gested that a version of himself hovers into being as a character in the
novel. Asked by an interviewer if it could be said that “the character
most similar to you is also the most unlikable—­a selfish striver with
Yuppie tendencies,” McCann agrees that it could: “I would say yes; in
fact I’m going to do a recorded-­books version and I’m going to read
that chapter.”13 McCann locates another version of himself elsewhere
in the text:

There’s a scene in the book where the tightrope walker guesses every-
body’s birthday at a party—­he goes around and pickpockets their driv-
ers’ licenses. But the one person he doesn’t get is this idiot who says,
“Oh, I never carry my driver’s license”—­like me. And then the walker
goes out the door and says “28th of February”—­which is my birthday.
You’ve got to be a little self-­deprecating. I happen to be in New York,
I’m middle-­class, I live on the Upper East Side for my sins. But the
thing I’m attracted to is the edges.14

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 The Event of the Novel 25

The author “Colum McCann” is also unfixed in the second sense

that the public figure, “the internationally bestselling author,” who
emerges in the process of paratextual elements such as interviews,
promotional materials, and biographies is in a permanent state of
reinvention. The multiplicity of the author figure is discussed in more
detail in Chapter 9; for the present, however, it is enough to note that
inasmuch as each reinvention is an addition but not a replacement,

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multiple versions remain extant in texts and videos simultaneously
available online and elsewhere, and this means that there are many
different Colum McCanns existing simultaneously in space and
time. Even the Amazon​.com website has a population of coexisting
McCanns.15 On the Colum McCann page and in biographies provided
on the various pages promoting his most recent novels, the introduc-
tory narrative biography presents him as the author of Zoli, Dancer,
This Side of Brightness, and Songdogs but not the author of The Great
World or his latest novel, TransAtlantic. It also presents him as “a
finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award” despite
the fact that after being shortlisted, he went on to win the award
in 2011 for The Great World. This is a historical McCann, in other
words, but a currently accessible one and thus still contemporary.
The historical geography of the author Colum McCann is also inter-
estingly complicated by his status as both an Irish and an American
novelist. At the time when The Great World was published, McCann
was much better known in Europe than in the United States: “You’re
big in Europe,” one interviewer pointed out, “and I know your edi-
tors are hoping this will be your American breakthrough.” McCann’s
response was to emphasize the benefits of being relatively unknown
as a “contemporary American novelist” even at the same time that
he was “big” in Europe, in a remark that also indicates the influence
of an author’s public presence or image on the writing process: “I’ve
been sort of happy [the books] haven’t sold enormously. You have
to work then out of a reckless inner need rather than conform to any
market. The contemporary American novelist benefits in a way from
being ignored. It makes you angrier and makes you want to go into
all of those places where you shouldn’t.”16 These are some of the
ways, then, in which “the author” makes up one of the unstable and
internally multiple elements in the event of fiction. “The text” makes
up a second.

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26 Literary Geographies

The Tex t
While the novel, of course, conventionally maintains its status as a
major participant, if not the major participant, in the event of fiction,
in the “text as event” view of fiction, the text itself—­even the text in
the sense of the definitive version of a novel’s wording—­is no more
reliably a singular, self-­contained source of meaning than the author.
So far in these introductory chapters, I have been using the term text

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rather loosely, without establishing any precise definitions for the
terms text and work that would clarify the distinction. This termino-
logical vagueness enables the term text to be used flexibly in two main
ways: (1) in the sense of textual criticism, to denote the established
wording of the novel and (2) in a sense more akin to how Barthes
redefined the term to suggest the way in which that limited text par-
ticipates in intertextual space at large. When using the term work, I am
thinking of the novel as a physical object, a book, or an ebook, with
all the peritextual elements included—­cover design, layout, typeface,
illustrations, endorsements, tables of contents, and so on. So on these
terms, the text is multiple and various in the second sense described
previously, as an “explosion, a dissemination” of meaning within liter-
ary space, and the work is various and unfixed because of the multiple
editions and formats in which readers are able to access the text of the
novel.
This multiplicity—­the fact that “the novel” is many novels depend-
ing on the way it happens to explode in any reading event and on
the ways it is packaged and presented—­is discussed in more detail
in Chapter 10. Here, however, before we turn to consider the third
element in the event of the novel, “the reader,” it is worth noting
two points: first, that the packaging of a work generates a particular
literary space for the work in hand, and second, that the way in which
the work is presented and the ways in which it is encountered are
mutually influential. With regard to the first point, it is worth noting
that the currently available Kindle edition of The Great World includes
an excerpt from McCann’s subsequent novel TransAtlantic. Here
the peritextual apparatus establishes a direct and almost unavoidable
intertextual corridor, creating a threshold space in which Kindle read-
ers of The Great World find themselves simultaneously on the verge
of TransAtlantic. This raises the question of whether it is possible to
determine a precise point at which “the reader actually comes into
contact with, or enters, the space of the text.”17
While it seems evident that The Great World could not have
achieved its prominent position in the canon of contemporary US

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 The Event of the Novel 27

fiction without an impressive array of recognizable literary qualities,

it is worth bearing in mind Jane Tompkins’s point about Nathan-
iel Hawthorne’s classic novel The Scarlet Letter: Tompkins notes that
while it is “an object that . . . has come to embody successive concepts
of literary excellence,” it is not in itself “a stable object possessing
features of enduring value.”18 In other words, the status of acclaimed
novels is in practice sustained by their being located and relocated

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within powerful social and academic networks: literary objects them-
selves, Tompkins insists, are “not durable at all,” at least “in any
describable, documentable sense.” The sustained conviction that any
particular novel is a work of great literary art is therefore “a contextual
matter,” which is to say that its reputation depends on the situations
(i.e., geographies) within which it is encountered. Readings of such
novels arise “within a particular cultural setting (of which the author’s
reputation is a part) that reflects and elaborates the features of that
setting simultaneously.”19
As for the second point, we have the question of the audio CD
version of The Great World to consider. Is that a text? Is it read? A
significant number of online bloggers and commentators who discuss
the novel encountered it first or only as an audiobook. In a comment
posted on January 7, 2010, to the Audible​.com promotional page
for the CD version of The Great World, for example, Robert explains
how his appreciation of that version of the novel led him to purchase
a print edition. In the end, however, he found that he preferred the
experience of listening to the audio version to the experience of read-
ing the printed version:

I had to buy the hardcover version . . . BUT—­the Audible version is

better than the hardcover. This is a book of voices—­in much the same
way that Dylan Thomas wrote “Under Milkwood” as a play for voices
on the radio. Each chapter in the book is narrated by a different char-
acter. In the audio version, each chapter (and character) is narrated by
a different actor. The narration is superb and adds a rich and fulfill-
ing dimension to the book that makes it all the more impressive and
enjoyable.

The audio format fails to work, however, for Andrew George,

another contributor to the same web page discussion, whose com-
ment posted on March 12, 2010, warns readers that The Great World
is one of those “great books that also happen to be painfully boring
audiobooks”: “I’ve come to find that beautifully written books where
nothing happens tend to make poor audiobooks. That’s exactly the

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28 Literary Geographies

case here. This book creates a vivid set of characters, but it basically
stops there. I need more than that in an audiobook, I need to be
entertained as well as impressed by use of language. Especially because
I can’t see and appreciate the words on the page.”

The Reader

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Finally, we come to “the reader.” When literary critics refer to “the
reader,” they are likely to be talking about “an interpretive (not a nat-
ural) category,” one that, like “the text,” operates “as a hermeneutic
device in practical criticism and the other areas of literary study.”20 This
figure of the projected or ideal reader, conjured up for strategic critical
purposes, differs from the many actual readers who engage with a text
in the real world. But at the same time, even the actual engagements
with the text performed differently by each of those readers cannot
be understood as purely individual for the simple reason that identity
itself, while unique to each person, can be understood as generated
in social contexts and relational by nature.21 What this suggests is that
while a reader of The Great World is a single individual, performing
a unique and personal reading, that reader will at the same time be a
participant in a social context, and that social context will inform and
modulate that reading. This context for reading will include not only
the significant, albeit frequently unacknowledged, presence of other
readers but also a wide range of absences, gaps, and misunderstand-
ings, equally significant and probably even less recognized.22
There is a productive tension at work here between individuality
and collectivity, unique readings and social contexts, and this ten-
sion becomes even stronger in the public performance of reading and
interpretation. It is practically impossible to track precisely how read-
ers engage with and respond to particular texts; the individual reader’s
silent reading processes remain a mystery, and there is really no objec-
tive process by which we can gain unmediated access to individual
readings. All we have is what readers articulate about their readings,
and it is inevitable that in articulating their ideas and reactions to a
text, people will always in some way be arranging and simplifying what
was originally a messy and evolving reading experience into some kind
of coherent shape, argument, or narrative. Furthermore, given that
the original reading process is always itself to some extent relationally
produced, the communication of elements of that reading will be the
result of a double process of contextual shaping and modulation.
Real readers engage with the text in innumerable variations and—­as
with the author—­even “the same person” can be a different reader

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 The Event of the Novel 29

under different spatiotemporal circumstances. Online discussion

groups and blogs where readers record their experiences as they read a
novel chapter by chapter provide useful evidence of the ways in which
reader reactions to a text may change even during the course of a first
reading. While these changes may appear to be primarily a matter of
time, they also result from a reader’s continuous process of relocation
in social and literary space, a relocation that might, for example, be

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affected by the very process of engaging with other readers or poten-
tial readers, even by the process of articulating a response. As Jane
Tompkins argues, there is “never a case in which circumstances do
not affect the way people read and hence what they read—­the text
itself.”23
The variability of even a single reader comes interestingly to the
fore in cases where people abandon their reading only to return later,
or read the novel and then later reread it, or read it in one format and
then purchase it in another. In these cases, the readings are performed
by someone who is “the same reader” in some ways but “a different
reader” in other ways—­because a second attempt has been inspired
by some change in circumstance or motivation or, even more obvi-
ously, because the second reading will be conditioned to some extent
by comparison with the first. A post by Erin about The Great World
on her website Erin Reads (July 15, 2011) begins by asking whether
anyone is actively reading the novel: “I have to start by asking, just
because I’m curious: is anyone still reading Let the Great World Spin?
I can’t believe how many people have told me they tried and couldn’t
get into it, either for Reading Buddies or on their own. (There is a
Goodreads thread going for Let the Great World Spin, but it hasn’t
seen much action!)”
Although she uses the word reading, Erin explains in her discus-
sion that she is actually listening to an audio version, noting that “that
format seems to be working for me,” an interesting reference to the
bodily experience of reading—­what David Coughlan refers to as “the
rhythms of the body which produce the space of the text.”24 In a
comment posted to Erin’s website on July 17, 2011, Lisa comments:
“I read this book awhile ago. I had a hard time with it. I am pretty
sure I finished it—­but I may have skimmed some of it. I can imagine
the audio book format might be a good choice for this book.” Also
on July 17, Margot comments that when she got to the end of the
first story she wanted to give up. On August 3, Erin responded: “I
do think it’s worth reading, though perhaps I can say that because
I listened to it instead of making myself sit still with a book I was
struggling to read!” In describing her experience with the novel, Erin

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30 Literary Geographies

provides a good example of how reading/listening motivation, speed,

and intensity vary in time and according to the social context of the
engagement, even for a single reader: “I will admit the first story,
about an Irishman and his brother, was very slow for me, and had I
not committed for Reading Buddies, I may have given up. (If you quit,
did you make it past this first story?) The very end, though, caught my
attention, and I was interested to continue.” Erin posts her comments

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on the novel having just finished the first section, remarking that “I
am mildly intrigued to keep reading, and I’ll definitely finish the book,
but I can see why many have set it aside.” The importance of read-
ing groups and the influence of social contexts for reading on “the
reader” is emphasized again in the comments posted on the blog. On
July 17, 2011, for example, Jenny remarks that “I would have set this
book aside if I hadn’t been reading it for book club,” and on July 26,
Jenners adds, “like you, I’m not sure I would have continued on if I
didn’t have an ‘obligation’ to read it.” The blog post appears to have
motivated Amy, who commented on July 16 that “I haven’t started
reading it yet but I’m hoping too and am still going to try to finish
it by the end of the month,” adding, “Your post has me even more
interested! . . . Thanks, Erin!” Margot, however, was less convinced:
“I’ll stay with it a bit longer—­maybe through the next story. But it’s
going to have to improve to keep me going.”
On another personal blog, Melissa Firman—­ “writer. reader.
mom.”—­in her review of The Great World on February 3, 2011,
explains that she was so “enthralled and enchanted” with the copy
of the book she borrowed from the library that as soon as she had
finished it, she bought a Kindle version. Although this baffled her
husband—­ “you bought a book that you just read?!”—­Firman is
confident that her readers, “dear literary ones,” will not need any
explanation. “You HAVE to OWN it. You have to have it near you
at all times, because you never know when you are going to want
to—­make that, need to—­re-­read it.” She adds that she’s “not above
buying a print copy either, if the price is right.” Readers adding com-
ments to the blog on February 5, 2011, agree: “I sometimes buy
books that I’ve already read, too, especially when I know I’ll be read-
ing them again,” writes Mindy Withrow, while Introvertedjen calls
those rereadable books “dear friends.” In an interesting extra note on
the issue of audiobook reading, JoAnn’s comment from February 4,
2011, notes that it was “so good on audio that I feel like I ‘experi-
enced’ it rather than read it.”

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 The Event of the Novel 31

Autho r, Tex t, Readers

The last point that needs to be made here about the author-­text-­reader
nexus is that even the borders between these three elements cannot,
in the end, be confidently maintained. The tripartite division is con-
ventional but in practice difficult to sustain. Once we begin to think
of the author and the reader, for example, as relational effects rather
than independent entities, then we can start to think of the event

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of the text as a contingent achievement. This is important for work
in literary geography because it shifts the emphasis away from the
critical assessment of a reading and toward an engagement with the
range of readings that is less concerned with evaluation. In so doing,
it becomes less interested in distinguishing good readings from bad
readings, skillful analyses from unsophisticated reactions, and instead
becomes able to consider the ways in which different kinds of reading
perform different kinds of contextual appropriateness. While a skillful
academic reading would probably be highly valued and productive in
a graduate seminar—­a situation in which the participants shared com-
mon interests, terminologies, references, purposes, ambitions, and
conventions of interaction—­it would probably be far less useful, and
perhaps even annoying or disruptive, in the context of a recreational
reading group or a book review for a general audience.
Readers, texts, and authors interact in complex ways in literary
space-­time. Each of these conventionally distinct actors involved in the
text event is both internally multiple and reciprocally influential. No
matter how much they have in common or how well established their
group conventions, a collection of readers meeting up in a reading
group to discuss McCann’s The Great World will always be engag-
ing with their book of the month differently. Each person’s reading
of the novel and input into the discussion will be unique; reading
group members will at times agree with each other and at other times
disagree. But their collective engagement with the text and their col-
laborative negotiation of ideas and interpretations will always to some
extent be mutually coproductive.
Once characterized as nothing more than “stamp-­collecting”—­
the compiling of examples of “landscapes in literature”—­ literary
geography has in the past few decades come to include both close
reading analyses of literary texts achieved through a practice of
“reading spatially” and also “distant reading” analyses of spatial dis-
tributions rendered cartographically.25 A start has also been made on
the geographies of production (in particular, inspiration, creativity,
and authorship) and reader response.26 The idea that the relationships

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32 Literary Geographies

connecting authors, texts, and readers are themselves inherently spa-

tial opens up the further possibility of engaging with the novel as a
geographical phenomenon in itself, an event that emerges in indi-
vidual readings that are nonetheless highly relational. The novel, as it
happens, can in this way be understood as something constituted in
and through engagements, interactions, and relations not just with
other texts but also with various authors and various readers.27

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How is it possible to grasp this kind of unstable and dynamic inter-
action? Doreen Massey’s way of understanding place offers some
suggestions. For Massey, place is something that happens at “the
coming together of the previously unrelated”: it is “a constellation
of processes rather than a thing”; it is “open and internally multiple,”
not “intrinsically coherent.”28 Thinking of fiction as an interaction
between writer, text, and reader, fiction can be understood in pre-
cisely these terms: like place, fiction happens in space, is the product
of interrelations, emerges in the dimension of coexistence, and is
always in a state of becoming. Taking this view of fiction, we become
able to see it not just as the product of geographies, or the repre-
sentation of geographies, but also as a geographical event in itself.
Reader-­response theory and spatial theory, thus combined, allow the
novel to be understood as an event that emerges as readers face what
Massey calls, in relation to place, “the challenge of the negotiation of
multiplicity.”29

Co nc lusio n
This, then, is the basic argument of the book: fiction can be usefully
understood as a geographical event, a dynamic unfolding collabora-
tion, happening in space and time. This shift in perspective opens up
a new dimension for the study of fiction, unfixing the text as stable
subject matter and reconstituting it instead as a process, a set of rela-
tions, an event emerging at the meeting points of agents and net-
works. Let the Great World Spin can be understood on these terms as
a geographical nexus that happened and continues to happen in the
complex interaction of agents and situations scattered across time and
space, both human and nonhuman, absent and present.
It is in this sense that a work of fiction comes to life—­happens—­in
the interaction of various elements, conventionally stabilized in the
tripartite division “author-­text-­reader” but with each element oper-
ating within that structure characterized by internal variation and
multiplicity. Through their interaction in space-­time, these individu-
ally multiple elements collectively generate particular contexts within

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 The Event of the Novel 33

which the novel emerges as a spatialized and transitory event. In refer-

ring to contexts here, I am not using the term to indicate something
fixed, a backdrop or frame. I am not suggesting that contexts come
first, are static, or exist independently of interaction, and I certainly
do not want to suggest that particular readings evolve or emerge
naturally in and from particular situations. My understanding of con-
textual milieu here is instead based on Nigel Thrift’s definition of

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context as “a performative social situation,” “a parcel of socially con-
structed time-­space.”30 Crucial to this use of the concept of context
is that it does not imply a fixed time and place: it is not necessarily
local nor does it necessarily imply simultaneity. In other words, while I
am emphasizing the way that particular, individual readings (engage-
ments with text) always have a unique “where and when” taking place
in the flow of an always emerging “here and now,” this location in
space-­time cannot in any sense be fixed or explained by reference to
particular times and places.
In fact, the geography of the space-­time interactions that gener-
ate the event of the novel is currently changing quite rapidly with
the emergence of online media, personal blogs, and social media. As
authors, publishers, and readers all turn increasingly to online forms
of promotion, commentary, and communication, the space-­time of
the social contexts of writing and reading is being dramatically recon-
figured. Microblogging services, for example, are reconfiguring the
space-­time of the event of the novel. A search for The Great World
on Twitter immediately turns up a set of tweets documenting an
interaction that took place on November 19, 2013, when @NYCcyn
responded after only twenty minutes to @nickbilton’s posted resolve
to reread the novel: “Oh, how I love this book. Well worth a re-­
read and another and another” Nine minutes after @NYCcyn’s tweet,
@NanKilmerBaker joined the discussion, remarking, “I get goose
bumps just thinking about that read. I keep it next to my bed amidst
a leaning tower of treasured books.” About an hour later, @NYC-
cyn comes back into the discussion, adding, “Treasured indeed” and
noting that she has “just finished ‘TransAtlantic’ and [is] giving it a
second read now.”
This tiny twitter exchange can be unfolded to support a view of
socioliterary space in which Massey’s three basic propositions about
space in general become the following: (1) the geography of the novel
can be understood to emerge out of highly complex spatial interre-
lations that connect writer, text, and reader; (2) multiple writings,
rewritings, readings, and rereadings of any one novel will always coex-
ist in space at any one time; and (3) the novel itself can be understood

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34 Literary Geographies

in geographical terms not as a stable object of analysis but as a perma-

nently unfolding and unfinished event. Readers are always engaging
with space as the dimension of difference and distance, of “relations-­
between.”31 This means that an individual reader is always connected
in space-­time not only to a story, to a book, and to a text but also to
a narrator, an author, and a multitude of other readers, known and
unknown, present and absent, near and far. An individual reading, as a

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result, is always happening in the here and now of a particular engage-
ment with text in much the same way that unique places emerge in
space as “localized knots in wider webs of social practice.”32

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 Chapter 3

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Narrative Locations

A s work in literary geography has become in recent years more

consciously multidisciplinary, it has also inevitably had to start pay-
ing more attention to the various connotations and complications of
discipline-­specific terms. On the one hand, where fundamental liter-
ary concepts such as author, text, and reader might once have been
taken for granted as obvious and unproblematic by geographers, they
are now being understood in more complex terms; on the other hand,
spatial concepts such as place, space, scale, and distance, which might
once have seemed quite straightforward to nongeographers, are now
being interrogated within literary studies. Previously, for example,
geographers working with literary texts tended to concentrate primar-
ily on the complexities of geographical themes and terms and spatial
theory, while paying less attention to the constantly evolving complex-
ities of themes, methods, and theory in literary criticism. This worked
the other way around for literary critics. As work in literary geography
has become more multidisciplinary, however, more geographers have
begun to work seriously with literary criticism and narrative theory,
and more literary scholars have begun to engage with work in geogra-
phy and spatial theory; as a result, the distinction between disciplines
and specializations is becoming far less fixed. Today, terms relating
to literary texts that are contested and complex within literary stud-
ies but would previously have been considered rather straightforward
by nonspecialists are being given more consideration by geographers;
similarly, terms relating to geographical themes are being thought
through more carefully by literary critics.
In the past few years, work in literary geography has as a result
started to deepen its engagement with terminology on both sides of

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36 Literary Geographies

what remains to a considerable extent an institutionally sustained dis-

ciplinary divide. On the more literary side, Hsuan Hsu, for example,
has worked on the intersection of American literature and the pro-
duction of scale in the nineteenth century, while Jon Hegglund has
written on the concept of metageography in the context of modernist
fiction. Meanwhile, within cultural geography, recent articles in the
journal Social and Cultural Geography have, for example, looked at

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the relationship between narrative space, voice, and point of view and
at the complexity of the idea of “the reader.”1
This move toward an explicit attentiveness to nuance in both liter-
ary and spatial terminology has been a relatively recent development.
More conventionally, literary geography has been practiced in one
of two main ways: the first emphasizing narrative settings and the
second emphasizing author biographies. The first has usually been
practiced as a form of close reading, with fictional setting defined as
the locations in which the action takes place; these settings have then
generally been either treated as aspects of narrative internal to the text
or read comparatively as fictionalized versions of historical locations.
Originally, this kind of comparative analysis (text/world) tended to
treat fictional settings as straightforward representations, either by
using them as geographical data or by investigating their geographical
accuracy. More recently, and especially in relation to literary tour-
ism, there has been a move toward understanding the ways in which
actual locations and fictional settings are mutually constitutive. The
second conventional approach to literary geography has developed
as a form of biographical criticism in which the geographical experi-
ence of an author is connected to the use of setting in that author’s
work. Obviously, the two approaches have quite often been used in
tandem: geographically oriented studies of works by Thomas Hardy
and William Faulkner, in particular, have emphasized the relationship
between fictional setting and historical locations, as well as the signifi-
cance of the author’s own spatial history.
This conventional approach to literary geography, emphasizing as
it does the concept of fictional setting, derives from and depends on
a particular metageography—­which is to say, a specific set of assump-
tions about the way space is organized. In this case, the assumed
metageography is one in which the world is understood as being orga-
nized into variously scaled sets of interlocking pieces that together
form a mosaic—­in fictional terms, these pieces are discrete settings. It
is a “mosaic” metageography because it is grounded in the assumption
that at any naturalized scale (e.g., global, national, regional, or local)
global space is made up of separable parts (e.g., neighborhoods, cities,

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 Narrative Locations 37

regions, areas, nations, or continents) that, within the spatial logic

of an assumed scale, fit together neatly with minimal overlapping.
In cases where it is assumed there is no overlap at all (nation-­states,
for example, or continents, or apparently separate cities), this mosaic
space presents itself much like a jigsaw.2 This is obviously an oversim-
plification: the nation-­state jigsaw is compromised by ambiguous areas
such as international commons (e.g., Antarctica), occupied territories

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and battlegrounds, “no-­go” zones, and “spaces of exception” such as
the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, national flag–­carrying seafaring
vessels, military bases, and embassy grounds.3 Nevertheless, even while
people understand that these contested or anomalous spaces exist, the
assumption remains that space can, in general, workably be treated at
any particular scale as a form of mosaic or interlocking jigsaw.
This chapter—­which focuses on narrative locations—­works for the
time being within this conventional spatial framework of stable mosaic
space containing distinct places as it sketches out the various loca-
tions of the action in its case study text. At the same time, however,
it begins to hint at the limitations of this mosaic metageography with
early indications that The Great World is not going to be read here as
simply “a New York novel” or even simply a novel with scenes taking
place in a range of discrete locations—­New York, Dublin, Cleveland,
Palo Alto, Little Rock, New Orleans. Thus while this chapter gen-
erally follows a metageography of container space (which is to say,
a metageography that regards space as a kind of box within which
action happens), it also starts to move toward an argument that will
be developed in more detail in Chapter 4: while The Great World does
have a set of distinguishable settings, it also performs through its nar-
rative style quite a different metageography from that of the mosaic.
This alternative metageography resists a static view of world space
organized according to clear borders in order to emphasize instead a
global space of interconnectedness and networks, a space in which a
single event may happen simultaneously in multiple locations and in
which apparently singular locations embody multiple historical and
social dimensions.
This way of reading the novel clearly results from my reading posi-
tion as an interdisciplinary literary geographer and my position on
the question of narrative setting and literary space. I am certainly not
arguing that it is an authoritative reading; rather I am presenting this
reading as an example of one of the multiple readings enabled by the
text. My spatially oriented reading of The Great World starts here in this
chapter with a fairly conventional review of its various narrative loca-
tions (simple settings), which also considers briefly how these various

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38 Literary Geographies

locations are generated or performed. This review also functions as a

summary and overview of the novel itself and—­as any summary neces-
sarily performs a particular way of reading the novel—­an introduction
to the spatial reading of the novel offered in this study as a whole.

The Great World

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The narrative of The Great World is organized into 13 chapters. While
the opening scene-­setting chapter has a conventional third-­person
narrator, the remaining 12 chapters are each narrated from the per-
spective of one of 11 major characters: some in the first person and
others in the third-­person limited. The second chapter, for example,
is narrated in the first-­person voice: “One of the many things my
brother, Corrigan, and I loved about our mother was that she was a
fine musician.”4 In the final chapter, in contrast, the point of view of
the central character is presented more obliquely in the third-­person
voice with her inner thoughts the only ones open to the reader: “That
way’s England, said Ciaran, for no reason she could discern.”5 The
first of the 13 narrative chapters, the only section with a conventional
third-­person narrator not identified with any particular character, is
a five-­page introduction that describes the pivotal event of the wire-
walk focalized through the collective point of view of its street-­level
audience. After this short scene-­setting chapter, the novel is divided
into three “books” of three chapters each, with an additional two
chapters (one inserted at the end of Book One and the other at the
end of Book Two) recounting the experience of the wirewalker as he
trains for and then executes his performance. The narrative “now” of
the first 12 chapters is the mid-­1970s, and the narrative “where” is
primarily New York City, except for the eighth chapter, in which the
central character is a prisoner in jail in Connecticut, and the twelfth
chapter, which is presented from the perspective of a teenage com-
puter programmer working in Palo Alto, California. The “here and
now” of the final chapter, the thirteenth, is primarily New York City in
2006. It is the here and now of these various narrative locations that
is reviewed in this chapter.
The first section, the opening chapter, is narrated in the context of
lower Manhattan, in the streets around the World Trade Center, early
in the morning of August 7, 1974. “Those who saw him hushed,”
the novel begins. “On Church Street. Liberty. Cortlandt. West Street.
Fulton. Vesey.” From the very beginning, with this listing of the
names of the streets on which the wirewalker’s audience gathered, the
setting of the novel is given a documentary specificity. These are the

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 Narrative Locations 39

names of streets that actually existed in 1974; the historical versions

of these streets are the locations from which Philippe Petit’s real audi-
ence were able to watch his performance. In this way, the historical
setting of the novel is firmly grounded from the first few sentences in
a believable version of New York City.

B o o k One: C iar an, Cl aire, L ara

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Following the introductory section, the first set of chapters, Book
One, begins with a chapter narrated in the voice and from the point
of view of Ciaran Corrigan, an Irish man from Sandymount, near
Dublin; it starts with his seaside childhood and from there carries the
narrative through from his arrival at JFK airport to the death of his
brother John (known simply as “Corrigan”) in a New York City hos-
pital on the day of the wirewalk. In the Dublin section, there are also
references to the time Corrigan, a priest, spent in Europe: “He had
long angled for a posting somewhere in the Third World but couldn’t
get one. He wanted somewhere with a rougher plot. Brussels was too
ordinary for him. He spent a while in the slums of Naples, working
with the poor in the Spanish Quarter, but then was shipped off to
New York in the early seventies.”6
The second chapter is narrated in the third-­person limited voice by
Claire Soderberg, a middle-­aged woman originally from the South, a
college graduate, who is married to Solomon, a Jewish New York City
judge. Raised in a wealthy household in Florida, Claire had rebelled
against her father’s race prejudice. In the course of the novel’s 1970s
chapters, Claire becomes close friends with Gloria, a black woman
who lives in the South Bronx, probably in the same building as Cor-
rigan, near the Deegan overpass. The two women, Claire and Gloria,
are separated by race, income, and social status, and therefore, not
surprisingly, also by the distance separating the New York neighbor-
hoods in which they live, but Claire is convinced that the things they
share are more significant than the barriers and the distances that sep-
arate them: “Let me tell you, Gloria, the walls between us are quite
thin. One cry and they all come tumbling down.”7 Nevertheless, the
literal and social distances separating Gloria and Claire are evident: the
Soderbergs live in a penthouse apartment on Park Avenue at Seventy-­
Sixth Street. The apartment has a maid’s entrance; the building has a
doorman and an elevator attendant. This is by far the most exclusive
dwelling in the novel. In Claire’s chapter, she travels to Staten Island,
the Bronx, and the Lower East Side because of her social connec-
tion with a group of other mothers who have also lost sons in the

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40 Literary Geographies

Vietnam War; also included in the chapter are scenes linked to Viet-
nam itself and to the West Coast location of the Palo Alto Research
Center (PARC), where her son Joshua worked in computers before
being sent to the war zone as a technical expert. A noncombatant,
Joshua was killed in an attack on a café: “It was early morning, the
sergeant said, Saigon time. Bright blue skies. Four grenades rolled in
at their feet.”8

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The third chapter is narrated in the first-­person voice by Lara, the
passenger in a car involved in a fatal accident on the FDR Drive on the
day of the wirewalk. Lara’s car clips the back of the van being driven by
Ciaran’s brother Corrigan along the parkway on the east side of Man-
hattan. Corrigan and his passenger, a young woman named Jazzlyn,
are both killed: Jazzlyn dies immediately at the scene, and Corrigan
dies from his injuries later the same day in the Metropolitan Hospi-
tal on Ninety-­Eighth Street and First Avenue. Lara and her husband
Blaine are unhurt. The action in this chapter covers a wider range of
locations in New York City (FDR Drive, Metropolitan Hospital, the
Bronx, and Throgs Neck) but also includes a substantial section in an
unnamed and relatively rural area of upstate New York, where Lara
and Blaine have been living and working as artists. There are also
several references to the Midwest, where Lara was born and raised, a
“midwestern girl, blond child of privilege.”9 It is in this chapter that
we learn that Corrigan’s ashes will be sent back to Dublin.

The Wirewal k er
Slipped into the space between Book One (three chapters told from
the point of view of three different characters) and Book Two (three
more chapters again each told from a different perspective) is a short
chapter, narrated in the third-­person limited voice, describing the
wirewalk artist’s preparations. This chapter is primarily located some-
where in the rural West, apparently near the Rocky Mountains, in a
cabin and a meadow where the wirewalker practices. There are Rocky
Mountain elk and coyote appearing in this chapter, which also more
briefly describes time spent in upstate New York, Long Island, and
New York City.

B o o k Two : Fer nando, the Ki d, Ti lli e

Book Two opens with a chapter viewed by the reader through the
eyes of an amateur photographer, Fernando, as he heads to work on
the subway from the Bronx, down through Central Station toward

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 Narrative Locations 41

Wall Street, riding illegally in the space between the cars: “He surfs
the thin metal platform” as he takes photographs of new graffiti in
the tunnels and on the walls. He is on his way to his regular job at
his uncle’s barber shop, although his ambition is to become a profes-
sional photographer and sell a scoop of a picture to the New York
Times: “Someday they’d be clambering over themselves to get at him.
Fernando Yunqué Marcano. Imagist.”10 He imagines his business

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card: “fernando y. marcano. imagist. the bronx. u.s.a.” As the train
approaches the Wall Street subway stop, he sees a tag, a graffiti signa-
ture, that he hasn’t seen before: “He figures it’s brand new, it must
be, yes, and he gives a quiet fist pump—­someone’s come and tagged
downtown.”11 Fernando is excited by this new tag, particularly by its
location. His eyes closed, “He is mapping it out, the height, the color,
the depth of the new tag, trying to put a geography on it for the way
home, where he can take it back, own it, photograph it, make it his.”
Then he realizes that there are an unusual number of police around
in the subway station and starts to worry that they’ve seen him and
are going to give him a ticket for illegal riding. Realizing that they are
running, he changes his mind. “Someone’s gone and bought it,” he
decides: an accident or a murder. He squeezes out through the train
doors as they are closing, hoping to find out what’s going on, even
though it will make him late for work: “To hell with the barbershop.
Irwin can wait.”
The next chapter makes a radical jump in location to the West
Coast, to California and the Etherwest computer laboratory in Palo
Alto: an interior scene, a basement with a window but no natural
light. “It’s early in the morning and the fluorescents are flickering.”12
Four programmers are fooling around, patching through calls to
public phone booths in Manhattan, trying to find someone near the
World Trade Center:

It’s a thing we do all the time for kicks, blue-­boxing through the com-
puter, to Dial-­a-­Disc in London, say, or to the weather girl in Mel-
bourne, or the time clock in Tokyo, or to a phone booth we found in
the Shetland Islands, just for fun, to blow off steam from program-
ming. We loop and stack the calls, route and reroute so we can’t be
traced. We go in first through an 800 number so we don’t have to drop
the dime: Hertz and Avis and Sony and even the army recruiting center
in Virginia. That tickled the hell out of Gareth, who got out of ’Nam
on a 4-­F.13

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42 Literary Geographies

Earlier, one of the programmers had seen a message on the ARPA-

NET coming in from the AP news service, breaking the story that
someone was doing a wirewalk between the World Trade Center
towers in Manhattan.14 The programmer then talked a telephone
operator into providing a list of public payphone numbers near the
World Trade Center buildings. The narrator (Sam Peters, “the Kid”)
explains that the group then “programmed the numbers in, skipped

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them through the system, and . . . took bets on whether he’d fall or
not.”15 Much of the chapter is taken up with phone conversations
between the Palo Alto lab and Manhattan: when calls are picked up,
the programmers try to persuade whoever has answered into describ-
ing the scene unfolding above them. What happens to the wirewalker
is left unresolved in this chapter, as the Kid’s last caller hangs up and
the programmers go back to their work developing a graphic program
for the Pentagon. The Kid keys in his password—­which could easily
be one of Fernando’s tags, samus17—­and turns back to writing code:
“It’s cool. It’s easy to do . . . You’ve got the whole country onboard.
This is America. You hit the frontier. You can go anywhere. It’s about
being connected, access, gateways.”16
The third chapter in Book Two is narrated in the first person by
Tillie, a prostitute, whose daughter Jazzlyn was killed in the car crash
on FDR Drive with Blaine and Lara that also killed Corrigan. As the
chapter opens, Tillie is in prison in Connecticut, miserably far away
from her small granddaughters, Jazzlyn’s now motherless children,
who are back in the Bronx; a rap sheet of charges committed in loca-
tions ranging from the South Bronx to Chicago has finally caught
up with her. Tillie is in prison throughout her narration; the chapter
ends with what the reader later learns is the moment she is preparing
to commit suicide. But as she looks back over her life and tells her
story, the locations of her narrative range across a variety of New York
locations that—­like Claire’s narrative—­draw attention to the compli-
cated ways in which money, power, access, and place intersect in the
city. They also reach as far as Cleveland and by extension—­through
one of her clients—­to Syria, Persia, and Iran. Tillie’s working life as
a prostitute charts a steady downward descent in social space and a
gradual slide into increasingly dangerous locations. As a child, she
lives opposite “the stroll” on Prospect Avenue and East Thirty-­First
in Cleveland; she can see the prostitutes working from her bedroom
window. She sees the pimps as they go by “on their way to the Turkish
hotel.”17 When she turns 15, she walks into the hotel herself, collect-
ing wolf whistles and making heads turn. “Right there I began walkin’

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with a bounce . . . Hose, hot pants, high heels. I hit the stroll with a
vengeance.”18
As soon as Tillie arrived in New York at the Port Authority Bus Ter-
minal, she lay down on the ground so she could “see the whole sky”
of the city around her. She starts working her first day, beginning with
“fleabag hotels over on Ninth.” Recruited by a pimp called TuKwik,
she is soon working “the best stroll, Forty-­ninth and Lexington.”19

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On Lexington, she recalls, “They got hotels with wallpaper and room
service and real gold paint on the rim of plates.” She works in the Wal-
dorf Astoria, cruises Park Avenue, and spends a week with a man who
reads Persian poems to her in the Sherry-­Netherland: “We had crystal
cocaine and caviar and champagne in a bucket.”20 But a gradual slide
downward sees her end up streetwalking under the Major Deegan
Expressway overpass in the South Bronx with her daughter Jazzlyn.
In prison, Tillie relives her week of champagne and poetry in the
Sherry-­Netherland with the man who was “small and fat and bald and
brown.” He talks to her about the desert in Syria and “how the lemon
trees look like little explosions of color.” When he leaves, he gives her
a book of poetry: “I began to read Rumi all the time,” Tillie says. In
prison, Tillie is visited by “some white bitch,” a figure that readers
should recognize as Lara, the passenger in the car, now dating Ciaran
after he has come back to New York from a journey home to Ireland
to scatter Corrigan’s ashes. Lara cannot bring herself to explain her
visit, but as she leaves, she gives Tillie some books. Tillie is amazed
by Lara’s choice: “And I’m like, Wow, Rumi, how the fuck did she
know?”21
Between Book Two and the second of the wirewalker chapters, a
half-­page grayscale photograph is inserted into the text.22 The pho-
tograph has been shot upward from ground level between the two
towers and shows clearly the stretched wire and two cavalletti (sta-
bilizing wires); the tiny figure of the wirewalker and his eight-­meter
balancing pole is also visible. At the extreme top left of the shot there
is an airplane, its nose apparently only meters away from the left-­hand
tower, its left wing and part of the tail cropped by the upper edge of
the photograph. This is, in fact, a documentary photograph, inserted
into the narrative by McCann but here given a fictional attribution.
The original (historical) photograph was taken by Vic DeLuca for Rex
Images on August 7, 1974, and shows the real Philippe Petit walking.
In the novel, the photograph is attributed to the amateur photog-
rapher of the first chapter in Book Two, Fernando, the implication
being that this is the photograph he took after leaving the subway
at the Wall Street stop, “a jaunt in his step,” to follow the cops up

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44 Literary Geographies

to street level and find out what was happening. With the caption
“photo: © fernando yunqué marcano,” this pictorial quotation from
the historical archive becomes part of the fictional world of the novel.
Given the way in which the photograph suggests that the airplane
may be about to hit the left-­hand tower, it also functions as another
conflation of time and location: in this case, August 7, 1974, and
September 11, 2001.

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The Wirewal k er Agai n
Following the first of the wirewalker’s chapters, which came at the
end of Book One, the first chapter of Book Two had been presented
from the point of view of Fernando, the amateur photographer, and
it is a photograph supposedly taken by Fernando, of the wirewalker
midperformance, that ended Book Two. The photograph is followed
by the second of the chapters focusing on the wirewalker’s prepara-
tions. It opens with the artist performing for tourists in Washington
Square Park, “the beginning of the city’s dangerous side”; he is mak-
ing the transition from his solitary practice space to the reality of the
city where he will have to perform. He uses “the noise . . . the filth and
the roar” to “build up some tension in his body.”23 The city is a far
from welcoming place: he loses all his possessions in a robbery while
living in a cold-­water apartment on St. Mark’s Place: this “was the city
he had crawled into.”
As the narrative begins to describe the wirewalker’s performance,
the question of location zooms in from the city at large to become
intensely focused on his body: he has to “find the place of immobil-
ity” while moving. “He wanted his breath to enter the wire so that he
was nothing.” When the police helicopter arrives, it is an irrelevance,
a “small gnat in the air . . . The shouting, the sirens, the dull sounds
of the city. He let them become a white hum. He went for his last
silence and found it; just stood there, in the precise middle of the
wire, one hundred feet from each tower, eyes closed, body still, wire
gone.”24 Down below, as we learned in the opening sentences of the
novel, a matching deep hush has emerged out of the morning rush: “a
silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful.”25 After his arrest, jerked
back into the city, the wirewalker is hustled down to ground level and
pushed back into a world of sound: it was strange “to revisit the world
again: the slap of footsteps, the call of the hot-­dog man, the sound of
a pay phone ringing in the distance.”26 He is driven away in a storm
of flash photography, the police car’s sirens full on: “All was red and
blue and wail.”

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B o o k Th ree: S o lo mo n, Adel i ta, Glor i a

Book Three again has three chapters: the first is narrated from the
point of view of Claire’s husband Solomon, the judge, who is hear-
ing cases on the day of the wirewalk at the criminal court building
on Centre Street in downtown Manhattan. He works through his
cases in consultation with his court officer, an official known as “the
bridge.” The first case up in the afternoon is “the People versus Tillie

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Henderson and Jazzlyn Henderson.” Corrigan is in the courtroom to
support them, but to the judge, he is not recognizable as a priest at
all; he is simply “the white man in the spectator’s section,” an Irish-
man, a “strange-­looking pimp.” Tillie pleads with the judge to be
sent to Rikers, a nearby prison, “cuz’a the babies.”27 After Jazzlyn is
released and Tillie leaves the court for prison, “vanished into her own
namelessness,” Judge Soderberg turns to the next case: “—­Get the
tightrope walker up, he said again to his bridge.” The chapter ends at
this point, and the reader has to wait for Gloria’s chapter at the end
of Book Three to find out how the judge dealt with the wirewalker.
The second chapter in Book Three picks up the Corrigan thread
with a narrative presented from the point of view of Adelita, a nurse
from Guatemala. In the anguished context of his commitment to the
celibate brotherhood, Corrigan has fallen in love with Adelita. Cor-
rigan knows that she came to New York with the dream of training to
be a doctor but that she has failed; nevertheless, he still calls her “Doc-
tor.” Adelita lives in a first-­floor apartment, which feels to her like the
center of all possible noise: “the apartment which receives all noises,
even from the basement below. For one hundred and ten dollars a
month, I feel as if I live inside a radio.”28 A week after the fatal day
of the wirewalk and the arrests, Adelita can still envision Corrigan on
her couch despite all that has happened in that week since Corrigan
appeared in Judge Solomon’s courtroom, started out for the South
Bronx in his van to take Jazzlyn home to her children, and was killed
in the car crash. Adelita remains confident in her connection to Cor-
rigan, a connection now materialized in a piece of furniture on which
he once sat: “Nothing will ever really take him from the couch . . . and
I will take it with me now wherever I go, to Zacapa, or the nursing
home, or any other place I happen to find.”29
“All Hail and Hallelujah,” the third chapter in Book Three, is nar-
rated in the first-­person voice by Gloria, one of the bereaved mothers
from the coffee morning group that Claire is hosting in her Park Ave-
nue apartment in her chapter of Book One. Gloria’s narrative opens
in the South Bronx, in the street below her apartment building, at

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the moment when she sees the “babies,” Jazzlyn’s children (Tillie’s
grandchildren), being taken away by officials from social services. “I
knew them almost right off,” she says, although what she knew was
simply that they “needed looking after.”30 Gloria, who has “lost two
marriages and three boys,” at this moment finds a new family and a
new energy. After one paragraph in the here and now of the South
Bronx, the narrative shifts to southern Missouri, then to Gloria’s mov-

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ing away to college in Syracuse in upstate New York, and then back
to Missouri: “The next time I truly came home to Missouri, years
later, I was freedom-­riding on the buses.”31 The narrative returns to
the recent past to revisit the coffee morning at Claire’s Park Avenue
apartment and the extremely awkward exchange at its conclusion with
Claire, who wants Gloria to stay as the others leave and in her eagerness
clumsily indicates that she is willing to pay her. In her embarrassment
and distress, uncertain whether she was right to go or whether she
should have stayed, Gloria leaves the apartment building and hesitates
at an intersection: “Walk, don’t walk,” the pedestrian sign says, and
Gloria wavers. But she wants to be alone at home, “to be buried in
my apartment, away from traffic signals” with her door locked and her
beloved opera on her stereo system. So she keeps on walking, even
though she has a subway token and enough money for a cab. She
walks through Harlem, her feet in pain as her shoes rub, determined
to make it home “one foot after another.” Then she is mugged. The
young female mugger empties Gloria’s handbag and slices open the
pockets of her dress, taking her purse, her driving license, and the
photographs of her lost sons. The mugger leaves the photographs
“scattered in a line down the pavement.”32 Stopping only to pick up
“what remained of my boys,” Gloria stops an unlicensed cab and tells
the driver to take her to Seventy-­Sixth and Park Avenue. The Bronx
would have been a shorter distance and a cheaper ride, but Claire, on
Park Avenue, is somehow, at this moment of crisis, closer.
Claire cleans Gloria’s feet and puts Band-­Aids on the wounds;
they spend the afternoon together, happily; there is a brief return to
awkwardness when Solomon eventually gets home, exhilarated from
his experience dealing with the wirewalker in court, but in the end,
Claire takes Gloria back to the South Bronx in a chauffeured hire car.
Gloria is sure that they both understand, intuitively, that they have
become friends: “We were on that road,” she thinks to herself. When
they reach the projects, there is “a commotion.” Some prostitutes
are crying in the doorway, and suddenly two little girls are brought
out of the building into the street light. “I knew them,” Gloria says.
“They were the daughters of a hooker who lived two floors above

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 Narrative Locations 47

me.” The girls are with two social workers. As the little girls, Tillie’s
“babies,” are being bundled into a car, Gloria intervenes. Janice, the
elder of the two children, turns and reaches out toward her; “You
know these kids?” asks the cop. Gloria says, “Yes”—­“as good a lie as
any: ‘Yes.’”33

Bo o k Fo ur : Jaslyn

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A turn of the page into Book Four and the final chapter: 32 years
later, the narrative thread is picked up by the smaller of those two little
girls. In this concluding chapter, Jaslyn is returning to New York to
see Claire, who is dying. En route, she meets an Italian doctor who
has been running a small mobile clinic “for veterans home from the
wars” in New Orleans. Jaslyn herself works for a small foundation in
Little Rock, assisting people left desperate after “Rita and Katrina and
all.” “We go round the trailer parks and the hotels,” Jaslyn explains.
“We help people fill out their tax forms and take care of things.”34
Pino, the doctor, asks her about her life. She wonders what she can tell
him:

That she comes from a long line of hookers, that her grandmother
died in a prison cell, that she and her sister were adopted, grew up in
Poughkeepsie, their mother Gloria went round the house singing bad
opera? That she got sent to Yale, while her sister chose to join the army?
That she was in the theater department and that she failed to make it?
That she changed her name from Jazzlyn to Jaslyn? That it wasn’t from
shame, not from shame at all? That Gloria said there was no such thing
as shame, that life was about a refusal to be shamed?
—­Well, I’m a sort of accountant, she says.35

Jaslyn’s chapter had opened, a few pages before this, with her mus-
ing on the famous photograph of Petit on the wire with the airplane
apparently about to hit one of the towers, the photograph reproduced
in the novel just after the chapter narrated from the perspective of
Tillie, Jaslyn’s grandmother. In the fictional world, of course, this
photograph was taken by Fernando, at the end of his chapter, “Tag.”
In the world of the novel, Jaslyn had come across a copy of Fernan-
do’s photograph in a garage sale in San Francisco in 2002; she had
bought it, framed it, and now takes it with her wherever she travels,
along with “other mementoes.”
This introductory meditation takes up only about a page of text
in Jaslyn’s chapter; the narrative then jumps to Little Rock, Arkansas,

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48 Literary Geographies

where she is standing in a security line at the airport. The impact

of the unmentioned events of 9/11 on people’s freedom to move
around the space of the United States is immediately flagged when
the man in front of her, the Italian working for Doctors Without Bor-
ders, makes an innocent joke to the security guard and is immediately
hustled away to be interrogated and searched. Later, embarrassed, the
doctor joins Jaslyn on the plane, and they fall into conversation. She

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learns he is from Genoa, has worked in Africa, Russia, and Haiti, and
spent two years working in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans in the
messy aftermath of the Katrina disaster. Jaslyn notices that his English
accent “has a couple of continents in it, like it has landed in each place
and picked up a few sounds in each.” The air of threat and danger and
the theme of “homeland security” and spatial surveillance, post-­9/11,
are reinforced when they land in New York and Pino, the doctor, pulls
out his cellphone to show Jaslyn photographs of his children: “No cell
phone use in the terminal, sir,” he is told.36
As Jaslyn lands in New York, her mind overflows with place names
associated with storm devastation after Hurricane Rita: “Sabine Pass
and Johnson’s Bayou, Beauregard and Vermilion, Acadia and New
Iberia . . . Diamondhead and Jones Mill, Americus, America.” Rita
made landfall on September 24, 2005, between Sabine Pass and
Johnson’s Bayou. These names are “in her mind, flooding.”37 Just
as the places they name were literally flooded, now they flood her
mind with memories as she arrives in New York. She shares a taxi into
Manhattan with Pino and gets out at Claire’s Park Avenue apartment
building. “Fancy,” Pino remarks, flagging yet again the upscale loca-
tion of Claire’s apartment. He kisses her good-­bye, and her mind is
back in Arkansas, imagining her coworkers somehow witnessing the
scene, as if “there might be some secret camera that beams it all back
to the offices in Little Rock, everyone looking up from the tax forms
to watch her wave goodbye.”38
At the Park Avenue apartment, Jaslyn is met by Claire’s nephew,
who clearly fails to understand why she has come. She is not wel-
come. Jaslyn’s narrative switches back to Little Rock and her work at
the foundation with survivors of Hurricane Rita. She recalls helping
the mother of a mailman; the only remains of her son she ever saw
was a bag full of undelivered mail. She heard later that his body had
been found “caught up high in a treetop just rotting in the heat.”39
The narrative then returns briefly to the present moment in the Park
Avenue apartment, and then it switches to a car journey Jaslyn and
her sister made to Missouri, taking the very frail Gloria home to
die. Again, the narrative jumps back to the present, to the awkward

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 Narrative Locations 49

moment with Claire’s nephew in the Park Avenue apartment, and

then Jaslyn removes herself to an expensive hotel she cannot afford.
A room for the night costs her the equivalent of a month and half of
her rent in Little Rock. Exhausted, she keels over on the bed, and the
narrative cuts back a few years to Jaslyn’s trip to Ireland, to visit her
sister Janice, who was coordinating US military flights into Shannon
Airport shortly after the attacks on Afghanistan. This seems to be the

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fall of 2001, the closest the narrative gets in time to September 11.
She drives to Dublin to find Corrigan’s brother Ciaran. He is by now
married to Lara and the “CEO of an internet company”; he has “half
an American accent,” and he has offices in Dublin and in Silicon
Valley.40
Ciaran and Jaslyn go to a pub and talk about the past: Jaslyn wants
to know if Corrigan and her mother were in love. Ciaran says no, “He
was just giving her a lift home, that’s all.” He takes Jaslyn home to
dinner with Lara: “The house was just off the seafront, whitewashed,
with roses out front and a dark ironwork fence. It was the same place
the brothers had grown up. He had sold it once and had to buy it
back for over a million dollars . . . His wife, Lara, was working in the
garden, snipping roses with pruning shears . . . She drew Jaslyn close,
held her for a moment longer than expected.”41
Breakfast not included in the price of her $425 room at the St. Regis
hotel, Jaslyn heads out looking for coffee and somehow, amazingly,
finds Pino, reading La Repubblica in a café. “She can already tell” that
they will spend the day together; as the day starts, her narrative makes
another jump, back to the Deegan underpass where Tillie and Jazzlyn
had been on the stroll. Jaslyn went back there once, sometime around
1996 after she finished college: “So she was home again, but it didn’t
feel like a homecoming.”42 There is a strange episode tucked into this
memory of the trip back to the Deegan, neatly reminiscent of the
opening scene of the novel in which pedestrians stop and point and
stare at the wirewalker. This time, the surprise is a coyote, “entirely
calm, loping along in the hot sun.” Jaslyn wants “to scream at it to
turn, that it was going the wrong way, it needed to double back, just
swivel and sprint free.” Men are circling with nets; there is the crack of
a rifle shot. Then the narrative switches abruptly to an image of Claire
and Gloria, sitting on a porch in Poughkeepsie, watching the sun go
down. Then the narrative jumps to Pino and Jaslyn together that
afternoon, and then, just as suddenly, it cuts to the elevator in Claire’s
apartment building. Jaslyn has brought flowers, and the Jamaican
nurse lets her in. She pulls up a chair by Claire’s bed, watches her as
she sleeps, and muses on the “fragments of a human order” on the

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50 Literary Geographies

bedside table. She climbs onto the bed and then carefully lies down
beside Claire. “The world spins,” she thinks. “We stumble on. It is
enough”: “She lies on the bed beside Claire, above the sheets. The
faint tang of the old woman’s breath on the air. The clock. The fan.
The breeze. The world spinning.”43

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 Chapter 4

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The Great World ’s New York

C olum McCann has talked in a recent interview about his inter-

est in “the blurred spaces between fiction and nonfiction, the ‘real
that’s imagined and the imagined that’s real.’” In his view, the “best
writers attempt to become alternative historians,” noting that his
understanding of early twentieth-­century Dublin has been “almost
entirely guided by my reading of Ulysses.”1 It is not surprising, then,
that despite all the believable details of the New York setting described
in Chapter 3, the New York of The Great World, in which so many
plot events take place, is clearly not a direct representation of any
“real,” physically accessible New York. Apart from anything else, the
New York of Books One, Two, and Three is a 1970s New York, and
the New York of Book Four, which is set in 2006, is a very different
place; so there are at least two versions of New York in the novel. In
addition, as each chapter except the first is focalized through a dif-
ferent character, the 1970s chapters present ten different versions of
New York. And finally, today’s New York—­the New York that might
be known to or visited by contemporary readers—­is different again,
as are the many historical New Yorks that will exist in the memories
and imaginations of the novel’s many readers. Taking these various
historical, known, and imagined New Yorks into account, and adding
them to the New York that emerges from the narrative, it becomes
clear that the cumulative New York of the event of The Great World
will always be a blend of fact and fiction, memory and projection, the
verifiable and the imagined.
Despite McCann’s interest as an author in the “blurred spaces
between fiction and nonfiction,” it is clearly important for many
readers that realistic settings—­here most notably, the New York of

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52 Literary Geographies

1974—­appear to be accurate and in accordance with their own mem-

ories and experiences. It is evident from reader reviews (comments
made in online book discussions and private book review blogs) that
for many people, perceived inaccuracies in the New York setting cre-
ate a credibility gap that blocks their enjoyment or appreciation of the
novel. In the context of the idea of the “text as spatial event,” this
kind of gap can be understood as an unbridgeable form of relational

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distance. The alienating effect of these “inaccuracies” presupposes a
particular approach to fictional setting: if the action appears to be
happening in a historical location, then the fictional version of that
location should be indistinguishable from the reader’s version of the
historical original. This, of course, is a view of setting that has been
quite conventional and at times dominant in the history of literary
geography and literary studies, and the genre of work that compares
fictional settings with historical originals, or superimposes fiction onto
apparently objective historical maps, derives from this position.2 This
assumption about the need for a performance of “accuracy” in fictional
setting, while less prominent as an issue in contemporary English-­
language literary geography, remains strong among readers, as the
review of The Great World posted May 18, 2010, on Bethfishreads​
.com by the blogger Beth Fish makes clear:

Why I Abandoned the Book:

I read almost half the book before I called it quits. There were several
reasons I stopped reading, but one stands out. In the first ninety-­seven
pages I found four factual errors and that ruined the book for me.
Instead of reading the fourth chapter for the story of two artists, I
treated the text as if it were a literary treasure hunt: Did Pontiac really
make a car in 1927? When was Max’s popular in New York? Did Nixon
really resign just days after the tightrope stunt? And when I didn’t find
an error, instead of relaxing, I started thinking that I hadn’t read the
story carefully enough.

One of the “factual errors” that Beth Fish notes is McCann’s refer-
ence to plastic bags in his fictional version of 1974 New York, and
this issue turns out to have been the crucial obstacle for many readers.

The P l astic Bag P ro blem

A single paragraph—­about plastic bags blowing about in the wind near
Corrigan’s tenement in the first section of Book One, “All Respects
to Heaven, I Like It Here” (Ciaran’s chapter)—­ has presented a

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 The Great World ’s New York 53

particular block to engagement for quite a few readers. The first refer-
ence to these troublesome bags is made by Ciaran as, newly arrived
from Ireland, he is in the Bronx trying to find his brother: “I scanned
the balconies of the high-­rises for any sign of Corrigan. The street
lights flickered. A plastic bag tumbled.”3 The image of the plastic bag
returns a few pages later in extended form:

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The projects were a victim of theft and wind. The downdrafts made
their own weather. Plastic bags caught on the gusts of summer winds.
Old domino players sat in the courtyard, playing underneath the flying
litter. The sound of the plastic bags was like rifle fire. Perhaps in a way
it was alluring, like little else around it: whole, bright, slapping curli-
cues and large figure eights, helixes and whorls and corkscrews. Some-
times a bit of plastic caught against a pipe or touched the top of the
chain-­link fence and backed away gracelessly, like it had been warned.
The handles came together and the bag collapsed. There were no tree
branches to be caught on. One boy from a neighboring flat stuck a line-
less fishing pole out of the window but he didn’t catch any. The bags
often stayed up in one place, as if they were contemplating the whole
gray scene, and then they would take a sudden dip, a polite curtsy, and
away.4

This paragraph has been the point of breakdown for quite a few
readers with their own memories or knowledge of New York and
the United States in the 1970s. A blogger called Dawn, for exam-
ple, who reviewed The Great World on May 10, 2010, for her
website Sheistoofondofbooks​.com, pointed to the plastic bags as
“inconsistencies”:

I did enjoy and admire McCann’s writing, but it didn’t win me over
from the very first page. There were some inconsistencies that bothered
me: a few scenes describe plastic bags caught on razor wire or dancing
on the wind in alleyways; I didn’t remember plastic grocery bags being
so prevalent until the mid-­to late-­80s. Wikipedia backed me up. Maybe
artistic license on McCann’s part, but it was enough to take me out
of the novel and on to Google (I’m funny that way; I recently read a
novel [in which I] experienced the same distraction trying to translate
the fictional Cape Cod setting into a real town). If you were born after
1980 you might not blink at the description of the plastic bag ballet,
but it stopped this reader in her tracks.

Commenters on Dawn’s blog agreed with her on this point. On

May 10, Wendy noted, “I was born in 1960, but I didn’t catch the

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54 Literary Geographies

plastic bag thing!” while Sandy admitted that “I didn’t catch the bag
thing, but then again I was listening to this on audio,” which makes a
suggestive point about how the text event may vary for an audio audi-
ence. Serena agreed with Dawn, “I caught the bag thing and it pulled
me out of the book as well,” the phrase “pulled me out” here empha-
sizing the distancing effect created by perceived inaccuracy. Anna
became convinced by Dawn’s comments in retrospect, despite not

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having noticed the “inaccuracy” in her own reading: “I didn’t think
about the plastic bags; I remember them in the book, but I didn’t
really think too hard on it. But you’re right, we only had paper for
much of my childhood years!” Lisamm, posting on June 19, sounded
particularly indignant: “I can’t believe you noticed that about the
plastic bags because SO DID I! I didn’t Google it but I did talk to my
mother about it, thinking her memory of 1974 would be a bit clearer
than mine, and she backed me up. ‘Paper or plastic’ wasn’t a question
in 1974!”5
In a review posted on April 5, 2011, the appropriately named blog-
ger The Picky Girl also complains about the plastic bags:

Then there were moments in the book that plain irritated me. I read
the [passage about the plastic bags] and thought to myself, huh, that
sounds familiar . . . It took me about 3 seconds to remember one of my
favorite scenes from the 1999 film American Beauty, where a young
filmmaker films a plastic bag dancing on the wind. This immediately
annoyed me, and then the further I read, the more annoyed I became.
Dawn at Too Fond of Books and Beth Fish Reads both point out that
the prevalence of the plastic bag occurred much later than the 70s. So
first, a rip-­off and then an inaccuracy. Along with the overuse of similes
and the seemingly pointless chapters, I was extremely disappointed in
the whole effect of the book.

Incidentally (at this point), in relation to the question of reader

response in the text event, which will be discussed further in Chapter
10, The Picky Girl is making an interesting assumption here: because
for her the plastic bags paragraph reminds her of a scene in a film, the
author is not only being inaccurate but also perpetrating a “rip-­off.”
The plastic bag issue also turns up in the New York Times online
Big City Book Club discussion of September 2011, when The Great
World was the novel of the month and questions of historical accuracy
were of particular significance, given that many of the readers were
or had at one time been living in the greater New York area. A com-
menter posting as Rosecasanova from Brooklyn, for example, assumes

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 The Great World ’s New York 55

that images used to characterize settings should be literally and his-

torically plausible:

As for historical accuracy . . . I questioned some of the analogies. He

uses the plastic bags hanging from trees to describe the garbage in New
York at the time. The notorious plastic bag that litters New York is the
plastic grocery bag that we see everyday. There was a time, before they

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cleaned up New York that you would see these bags flying all around.
The plastic grocery bag did not make an appearance in stores until
around 1982 . . . up until then we were primarily using paper bags to
carry our purchases. So, I don’t believe that the use of this metaphor
is accurate.

Here the reader is assuming (like previous commenters) that the

plastic bags Ciaran mentions are “the plastic grocery bag that we see
everyday,” although the bags are not identified as grocery bags in
the narrative. While it seems to be the case that plastic grocery bags
did not come into common use in the United States until the 1980s,
other types of plastic bags were in use earlier; however, the point here
is not to debate the assumption made by many readers that McCann
is anachronistically describing plastic grocery bags but rather simply to
point out the continuing importance for many readers of a correspon-
dence between their memory or knowledge of an actual place and the
version of that place used as fictional setting. Finally, to foreshadow
a point about narrative position that will be further developed in the
following chapter, it is worth noting that the chapter in which the
plastic bags appear is narrated in the first-­person voice, using the past
tense, at a time later than the events narrated. How much later, we
cannot know. In other words, while it is clear that Ciaran is narrating
events that took place in the novel’s version of 1974 New York, it is
not at all clear when he is doing this and how precise his memories
might be. If historical accuracy is taken to be important, then it seems
worthwhile to question whose voice is making the plastic bag “error.”
Is it McCann, the author, or Ciaran, the narrator?

N ew Yo rk C ity “H ere and Now ”

Let the Great World Spin begins with a street scene in Manhattan:
“Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty. Cort-
landt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey.”6 Immediately, with these opening
words, the “here and now” of the narrative moment—­New York City,
August 7, 1974—­will start to resonate in complex ways for any reader

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coming to the novel with knowledge of the events of September 11,

2001. For anyone who experienced directly or indirectly the 2001
attacks, visited the memorial site, read survivor accounts, or is familiar
with maps of the area before and after the attacks, the recital of the
Manhattan street names performed here in the novel’s second sen-
tence will have inescapable significance.
While it is historically accurate that these were, in 1974, the streets

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on which commuters stopped, watched, craned their necks, and mar-
veled at the Petit wirewalk taking place 110 stories above them, these
same street names in 2009, when The Great World was published,
were more powerfully associated with the 9/11 attacks. The effect
of this recital of street names, then, is that immediately from the start
the story has to be happening, for many readers, in a conflated loca-
tion that blends together two historic events, two very different New
York moments. The “here and now” is here, as it is again and again
throughout the novel, a doubled setting: one here with a double now
or, at other times, one now with a double or even multiple here. Time
and space are hard to pin down. Locations are full of memories, linked
into other times and places.
The New York City of The Great World becomes recognizable as
a place through the coming-­together, the meeting-­up, of multiple
times and places, histories and connections. It is a place that is always
under construction, never complete. Using David Harvey’s terms, we
could say that this New York City is a “permanence” in “the flow of
processes creating spaces,” with place as permanence always dynamic,
always changing, undergoing “perpetual dissolving.”7 Or, turning to
the terms used by Doreen Massey, we could say that the “specificity”
of this New York City as a place is not something inherent and stable
but rather something that emerges out of intersections and meetings,
multiple “stories-­so-­far.”8 “The specificities of space are a product of
interrelations—­connections and disconnections—­and their (combina-
tory) effects.” Places as “permanences” in a flow, as “specificities,” are
“contingent on the processes that create, sustain and dissolve them.”9
Reflecting, when he first learns of it, on the wirewalker’s outra-
geous artistic transgression, the judge who ends up hearing his case
believes that the wirewalker “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.”10 The event passed,
the world moved on, the walker was arrested, but the power of that
image, that temporary statue, would remain in place. And the power
of memory—­of moments that are both temporary and monumental,
then and yet now, there and yet here—­is critical to the geography of

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 The Great World ’s New York 57

place in The Great World and certainly part of the reason McCann sees
it as a 9/11 novel and yet at the same time an anti-­9/11 novel. The
emphasis on a complicated here and now, which is fixed and yet always
changing, is part of McCann’s strategy “to lift [the novel] out of the
9/11 ‘grief machine.’”11
Two Irish brothers, Corrigan and Ciaran, go out drinking together.
After Corrigan’s death, Ciaran remembers that night: “There are

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moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water—­it has
a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the
original stream. I was on the bottom bunk again, listening to his slum-
ber verses. The flap of our childhood letter box opened. Opening
the door to the spray of sea.”12 The wirewalker’s performance, and
McCann’s reanimation of that performance in The Great World, is
another kind of letter box opening to another world, a monument to
a memory and to “what it once filled”: what was there in the space
that would become ground zero, a hole, a gap, a tear in the fabric of
New York time and space. Key to the hopeful nature of McCann’s
narrative is the power of these monuments, these memories, these
passages through space and time, to provide courage for movement
into an unknown and unnerving future. Speaking of the research he
did for the novel, McCann has noted that “the deeper I discovered
the then of New York, the more profoundly it seemed to be talking
toward the now.”13

D ust
While 9/11 is never directly described in the novel, an oblique ref-
erence to a central and distressing result of the attacks is made in a
significant exchange between the two brothers. Corrigan is talking
about fear and about dust, and the double reference again works to
conflate 1974 and 2001:

“Bits of it floating in the air,” he said. “It’s like dust. You walk about
and don’t see it, don’t notice it, but it’s there and it’s all coming down,
covering everything. You’re breathing it in. You touch it. You drink it.
You eat it. But it’s so fine you don’t notice it. But you’re covered in
it. It’s everywhere. What I mean is, we’re afraid. Just stand still for an
instant and there it is, this fear, covering our faces and tongues. If we
stopped to take account of it, we’d just fall into despair. But we can’t
stop. We’ve got to keep going.”14

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Corrigan is using the dust here simply as a way of explaining to

Ciaran why he feels the Deegan streetwalkers are doing their best in
the face of an inescapable human sense of fear. But in the unavoid-
able context of the novel’s doubled here and now, this dust image
also functions as a reference to 9/11, when the city was covered in
the choking dust of disaster and terror. Dust functions literally in any
city as a tangible connection linking the present and the past, but

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in New York City, the link between dust and fear in the post-­9/11
world is particularly potent. In 1974, Corrigan is defending Jazzlyn,
a prostitute, to Ciaran, telling him “at least she’s trying.”15 Ciaran is
dismissive: “Trying? She’s a mess. They all are.” But Corrigan insists
that the streetwalkers are “good people” who “just don’t know what
it is they’re doing . . . It’s about fear. You know? They’re all throbbing
with fear. We all are.” His connection of fear with dust expands on the
idea of the pervasiveness of both elements, and this connection works
not only in the 1974 world of the brothers but also in the post-­9/11
world of many readers.
In his short memoir “Walking an Inch off the Ground,” McCann
talks of The Great World as a response to his personal encounter with
the events of 9/11. In his recounting of that day, he returns to the
word and the image of dust again and again. Similarly, in a conversa-
tion with the novelist Nathan Englander, McCann recalls how they
had years before talked about the book that would become The Great
World as they walked in Central Park: “I couldn’t shake the dust of
9/11 off me,” McCann recalls. “I had to clear it from the air around
me.”16 Working on the book while living in New York and struggling
to deal with his personal memories of the series of events convention-
ally referred to now as 9/11, McCann was haunted by the idea as
well as the reality of the dust created by the destruction of the towers,
minuscule fragments of lost buildings and lost lives literally still float-
ing in the air of post-­9/11 New York. Survivors had to breathe that
air and inhale that dust.
“I still have my father-­in-­law’s shoes in a box in the cupboard
of my writing room,” McCann explains in “Walking.”17 “I haven’t
looked at them in a couple of years, but they’re here, covered in the
dust of the World Trade Center towers.” It was in those shoes that
McCann’s father-­in-­law had walked down from the fifty-­ninth floor
of the north tower and made his way to the apartment on Seventy-­
First Street where McCann was living with his wife and children. His
father-­in-­law’s ruined, smoking clothes were quickly disposed of, but
the family kept the shoes “because they had carried him out and to
safety” and were, as a result, “a beacon of hope.” McCann explains in

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 The Great World ’s New York 59

the memoir that he still finds it difficult to take the shoes out of the
cupboard: “I still think that every touch of them loses a little more
dust. I am paralyzed by the notion of what that dust might contain—­a
résumé, a concrete girder, Sheetrock, a briefcase, a pummeled earring,
an eyelash, another man’s shoe. They sit in a cupboard behind me, in
my writing room, over my left shoulder, a responsibility to the past.”18
McCann recalls that, years before, he had read an essay about

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Philippe Petit’s wirewalk: a quarter of a mile up in the air, from street
level “he might have looked like a speck of moving dust.” That speck
of moving, animated dust becomes the center of McCann’s anti-­9/11
novel, a monument to the idea that nothing ends, that it is human
to move toward “the possibility, or desire, to create a piece of art
that talks to the human instinct for recovery and joy.”19 McCann has
written his novel and handed it over to the reader, and in referring to
the reader’s contribution to the event of the novel through an act of
“creative reading,” he refers once again to dust: “One of our dusty
little secrets is that, in writing a novel, we writers don’t always know
what we’re doing.”20

A D o o r sto p to D espai r
This is not, of course, to suggest that writers do not write with intent,
nor to suggest that McCann is not deliberately crafting a particular
version of New York, pre-­and post-­9/11. McCann takes a clear posi-
tion on his intentions as a writer: insisting that because it’s more dif-
ficult and more productive to have hope than to be cynical, he values
writers “who have the courage of their convictions. There is a light
to their work, an open door.” For McCann, fiction should be able to
“look at the world in all its grime and torment, and still find something
of value”—­he insists that a good novel can function as “a doorstop to
despair.”21 In The Great World, McCann creates such a doorstop with
the invention of a fictional world in which things accumulate and con-
nect: his doorstop New York is a city of layers and links, connections
and interactions, things somehow holding together against the odds.
Doreen Massey explains place as a “here” and a “now,” in which
“‘here’ is no more (and no less) than our encounter, and what is made
of it. It is, irretrievably, here and now. It won’t be the same ‘here’
when it is no longer now.”22 The New York of The Great World is here
and now for its readers at the same time that it is there and then, and
the “there” is made up of multiple “thens”:

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60 Literary Geographies

“Here” is where spatial narratives meet up or form configurations, con-

juncture of trajectories which have their own temporalities . . . But
where the successions of meetings, the accumulation of weavings and
encounters build up a history. It’s the returns . . . and the very differen-
tiation of temporalities that lend continuity. But the returns are always
to a place that has moved on, the layers of our meeting intersecting
and encountering and affecting each other, waving a process of space-­
time. Layers as accretions of meetings. Thus something which might be

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called there and then is implicated in the here and now. “Here” is an
intertwining of histories in which the spatiality of those histories (their
then as well as their here) is inescapably entangled.23

A point that will be developed in the following chapter on nar-

rative space is the extent to which McCann’s characters themselves
experience space and time as multiple: the wirewalker, for example,
simultaneously inhabits the meadow and the city as he rehearses his
performance; Adelita is somehow in New York and in Guatemala at
the same moment in her mind; the streets around the World Trade
Center are simultaneously full of the bustle and life of the 1970s and
the gaps and memories suddenly inserted in the early 2000s. The
New York of The Great World is in this sense like the photograph Jas-
lyn carries with her on her travels: something that renders visible the
“intrusion of time and history. The collision point of stories.”24
Because this complex geography of collapsed time and colliding
stories is the keynote to the novel’s New York, in this second chapter
outlining a reading of the novel’s setting the focus will be on layers
and links. How does McCann hold his sprawling story together and
create his “doorstop to despair”? The main argument here is that he
achieves it by creating a fictional location characterized by two appar-
ently contradictory spatial aspects: on the one hand, this is a place
built up out of multiple distinct dimensions, but on the other hand,
these different dimensions are shot through and connected, even
folded together like a crumpled handkerchief, by links that function
like narrative wormholes—­taking wormholes to refer to the hypo-
thetical “short cuts” through space-­time, acting as tunnels that have
their entry and exit points in otherwise unconnected, vastly different
locations.25

N ew Yo rk U ps and D owns
One of the aspects of setting that easily gets lost in a cartographic
approach to literary geography—­in which settings are typically located

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 The Great World ’s New York 61

in a two-­dimensional map space—­is its verticality, its ups and downs,

its literal layers. This is particularly important, obviously, in a city like
New York, where development has been closely tied in to technolo-
gies of height and depth such as the elevator, the skyscraper, and the
subway. “Up” and “down” are potent concepts in New York, relat-
ing not only to direction and location (uptown, the Lower East Side,
and so on) but also to social status. For example, one of the ways

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in which Gloria’s living situation in the South Bronx is contrasted
with Claire’s on Park Avenue is by reference to the elevators in their
buildings. Claire is very aware that she lives on the top floor of an
expensive apartment building; when her husband leaves for work in
the mornings, she hears the bell, the elevator boy, “the whine of the
door, the clank of machinery, the soft murmur of descent, the clang-
ing stop at the lobby below, the roundelay of the cables rising.”26 This
is completely different to the elevator in the projects where Gloria
lives: Claire “had never seen anything like it before. Scorch marks
on the doorways. The smell of boric acid in the hall. Needles in the
elevator.”27 At Gloria’s coffee morning, when the conversation turns
to the next meeting, one of the women says “Well, Claire, you’re up
next,” little realizing that “up” really is the key word. Claire man-
ages to explain to the group how to get to her apartment, looking
at Gloria for support, feeling that she has a mouth “made of chalk.”
Jacqueline immediately voices the reaction Claire had been dreading:
“You live on Park?” While Gloria calmly remarks “That’s nice,” Marcia
exclaims “Tea with the Queen!” and then Janet leans forward and says
“Oh, we didn’t know you lived up there.” Janet is referring to the loca-
tion, on the “Upper East side,” not the fact that the apartment is the
penthouse, with access to the roof. But still Claire feels faint, worried
that she might be showing off. “Up there. As if it were somewhere to
climb. As if they would have to ascend to it.”28 And when the women
do arrive, Claire worries about the elevator: will the doorman show
them to the service elevator or the elevator for residents and guests?
She tells him to make sure it’s “the correct elevator.”
The New York setting of The Great World is in this way a city of
heights: the wirewalker 110 stories above the commuters, and Claire
on her rooftop: “A momentary vertigo. The creek of yellow taxis
along the street.”29 It is also a city of depths: Fernando in the subway
tunnels, delighting in the new graffiti, wondering why none of the
artists ever tag the ceilings, “a brand-­new space.”30 These references
give the city a depth, emphasize the three-­dimensionality of the set-
ting as well as its social distinctions and its reliance on technology.
This sense of depth in the physical setting mirrors the layering effect

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62 Literary Geographies

of the narrative style, with each chapter adding a layer or a lamination

onto the previous chapter, as the narrative builds one storey (or story)
on top of another. The whole novel is a palimpsest of narratives—­a
layering of tags one on top of another, like the graffiti that claims and
reclaims the lower sections (literally and socially) of the city. This graf-
fiti, in fact, provide one of the “wormhole” images of the city that slip
between the layers, connecting the stories and the characters across

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space and time and ensuring that things don’t fall apart.

G r af f iti
The first reference to graffiti comes in Ciaran’s chapter at the start of
Book One. He is looking for his brother’s apartment in the Bronx,
walking toward the projects with some apprehension. There are her-
oin needles among the weeds, and “someone had spray-­painted the
sign near the entrance to the flats.” As he asks for help finding the
address, “a kid ran past, a metallic sound coming from him, a tinny
bounce. He disappeared into the darkness of a stairwell. The smell of
fresh paint drifted from him.”31 The projects are full of graffiti, “huge
swirls of fat graffiti on the walls. The drift of hash smoke. Broken glass
on the bottom steps.”32 Soon after his arrival, Ciaran is helping his
brother take residents from the old people’s home out in his van and
to a church. Even the church is “daubed in graffiti—­whites, yellows,
reds, silvers. tags 173. graco 76,” and the stained glass windows have
been broken.33 It seems, in fact, to be a city of graffiti: Ciaran, who has
just heard about Corrigan’s car crash at two o’clock in the morning,
bursts out of the apartment, “through the graffiti. The city wore it
now, the swirls, the whorls. Fumes of the fresh.”34 Even the cemetery
has been tagged, Lara notices, at Jazzlyn’s funeral: “It was hard to
believe that this was the Bronx, although I saw the graffiti scrawled
on the side of a few mausoleums, and some of the headstones near the
gate had been vandalized.”35
Most of the graffiti in the novel show up in the Bronx and in the
subway tunnels, at the “down” end of things: it’s part of Claire’s
experience taking the subway to the Bronx for the meeting at Gloria’s,
“only her second time” to take the train. “The train came, a wash of
color, big curvy whirls . . . one of those carriages covered head to
toe in graffiti.”36 But Lara makes an explicit connection between the
graffiti that the street artists scrawl on the city’s trains, tunnels, and
walls and the self-­consciously sophisticated paintings that she and her
husband produce in their upscale world and their upstate New York
retreat. Blaine and Lara paint landscapes: Blaine wants to “go back to

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 The Great World ’s New York 63

canvas, to paint in the style of Thomas Benton, or John Steuart Curry.

He wanted that moment of purity, regionalism.”37 But by the time
Lara leaves Jazzlyn’s funeral with Ciaran, she has come to doubt their
entire project: “At a Park Avenue overpass a kid swung on a harness
and ropes, spray-­painting the bridge. I thought of Blaine’s paintings.
They were a sort of graffiti too, nothing more.”38
One thing that has happened to change Lara’s mind is, of course,

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the car crash, and in the confusion after the crash, what happened
to the paintings they had in the back of the car. They had taken the
paintings down to the city to try to sell them but had failed. Then
once they got back to the cabin, they had accidentally left the paint-
ings out in the rain. They are ruined, a “whole year’s work,” “the
months and months spent painting.”39 Lara expects Blaine to be furi-
ous, crazy with anger, but to her surprise, he finds a way to salvage his
artistic pride. “I found the paintings,” he tells her, and she shudders,
bracing herself for the storm, but all he says is “they’re far out.” Lara
apologizes, and he brushes her apology aside: “Don’t you see?” he
says, “You give it a different ending. It becomes new. You can’t see
that?”40 Lara can’t help going back again and again to the car crash,
which so clearly can’t be given a different ending, can’t be made new.
Blaine refuses to go with her: “Listen to me,” he insists. “Look . . . it’s
about time . . . The paintings. They’re a comment on time.” Blaine
is completely convinced by his argument; it fits, Lara thinks, with
his “desire for surety, for meaning,” his yearning for patterns. Lara
is equally unconvinced by it; all she can think of is the destruction
they’ve caused:

—­What happens if we make a series of paintings and we leave them out

in the weather? We allow the present to work on the past. We could do
something radical here. Do the formal paintings in the style of the past
and have the present destroy them. You let the weather become part of
the imaginative force. The real world works on your art. So you give it
a new ending. And then you reinterpret it. It’s perfect, dig?
—­The girl died, Blaine.41

The K eyr ing

Elements like graffiti, functioning as wormhole connectors both in
the fictional city and in the texture of the fiction itself, drill through
the multiple narrative layers of The Great World, holding the whole
together, like stitches through a multilayered quilt. I would like to
round out this chapter by looking at one more example of these

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connecting objects/images, a plot hinge made up of a small but signif-

icant object that appears repeatedly throughout the novel. This object
appears and reappears in the narrative as it also literally moves around
the fictional city, from one person to another. This object is a keyring,
“a cheap little glass thing” that originally belonged to Jazzlyn. It is
first mentioned in the novel during Ciaran’s account of the arrest of
the prostitutes early in the morning on the day of the wirewalker’s

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performance. As the women are herded into police wagons, they lose
things—­“their lipstick or their sunglasses or their stilettos.” Tillie is
calm, “as if it happened all the time,” but Jazzlyn calls out, “Hey, I
dropped my keyring!”42 A page later, after Corrigan’s unsuccessful
argument with the arresting officers, he picks the keyring up from the
gutter. It has “a picture of a child in the center. Flipped over, there
was a picture of another child.” Corrigan shows the keyring to Ciaran
in explanation of his argument with the police: “That’s the reason,”
he says, “They’re Jazz’s kids.” In other words, the keyring has images
of Janice and Jaslyn, the babies Gloria will adopt and Claire will help
raise. Corrigan gives it one last failed attempt: “He stormed towards
the last remaining cop car, brandishing Jazz’s key chain. ‘What’re you
going to do about this?’ he shouted. ‘You going to get someone to
look after her kids?’”43
The keyring next appears in Lara’s chapter, when through a mis-
understanding she finds herself taking charge of Corrigan’s personal
effects after his death in the hospital. Corrigan had had the keyring
with him as he was “giving Jazzlyn a lift back to her kids, who were
more than keyrings, more than a flip in the air.”44 It ends up in the
box at the hospital, where among the odds and ends, a few dollars, a
parking ticket, a driver’s license, Lara finds “oddly, a key chain with a
picture of two black children on it.” She tries to figure out who Cor-
rigan was: “The only things I could really jigsaw together was that
John A. Corrigan—­born January 15, 1943, five foot ten, 156 pounds,
blue eyes—­was probably the father of two young black children in
the Bronx. Perhaps he had been married to the girl who was thrown
through the windshield. Maybe the girls in the key chain were his
daughters, grown now.”45
Lara takes Corrigan’s things to Ciaran at the apartment in the
projects. He takes the box and looks through it, searching for some-
thing. “He came to the keyring and gazed at it a moment, put it in
his pocket.”46 Then later, at the cemetery, during Jazzlyn’s funeral,
Ciaran gives the keyring to Tillie: “He reached into his pocket and
took out the keyring with the pictures of the babies, handed it to
Jazzlyn’s mother.”47 So by this point, the keyring has passed from

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 The Great World ’s New York 65

Jazzlyn to Corrigan to Lara to Ciaran to Tillie, who treasures it in jail:

“I got the keyring with the babies on it. I like to hang it on my finger
and watch them twirl.”48 Now an interesting shift occurs in the func-
tion of this connecting object/image. Tillie keeps the keyring, but it
reconnects with Lara once more when she visits her in jail; Tillie tries
to understand why she has come and how she knows her name. She’s
just “some white bitch” at first, who hasn’t even got any cigarettes, so

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Tillie can find no use in her. She asks, “Are you the one who got my
babies?” Lara explains that someone else is looking after the children:

Then she just sits there and starts asking me about prison life, and if I’m
eating good, and when am I going to get out? I look at her like she’s
ten pounds of shit wrapped in a five-­pound bag. She’s all nervous and
stuff. And I finally say it so slow that she raises her eyebrows in surprise:
“Who—­the—­fuck—­are—­you?” And she says, “I know Keyring, he’s
my friend.” And I’m like “Who the fuck is Keyring?” And then she
spells it out: “C-­i-­a-­r-­a-­n.”
Then the cherry falls and I think, She’s the one came to Jazzlyn’s
funeral with Corrigan’s brother. Funny thing is, he’s the one who gave
me the keyring.49

The keyring appears one more time, on the last page of Tillie’s nar-
rative, shortly before she commits suicide. Looking back over her life,
she remembers the moment when Corrigan tried to stand up for her
and for Jazzlyn on the day they were arrested: “One of the last things I
heard Jazz do, she screamed and dropped the keyring out of the door
of the paddy wagon. Clink it went on the ground and we saw Corrigan
coming out to the street with a muscle in his step. He was red in the
face. Screaming at the cops. Life was pretty good then. I’d have to say
that’s one of the good moments—­ain’t that strange?”50 The keyring, in
this way, functions as a token center for the web of relationships con-
necting Tillie and Jazzlyn, Janice and Jaslyn, Corrigan and Ciaran, and
Lara. Tillie’s memory of the moment the keyring was dropped onto
the street is also a memory of the moment that Corrigan attempted
a rescue, and it is the subsequent rescue of the two little girls whose
pictures are on the keyring that McCann has identified as the rescue
at the heart of the novel, its moment of hope. Gloria and Claire arrive
at the projects just at the moment that social services are taking the
children away. Gloria knows who they are, remembers their mother,
“pretty and vicious,” but had always kept herself away from them; in
the elevators, she had “stared straight ahead at the buttons.”51 Now,
still wearing Claire’s slippers on her blistered and bruised feet, after her

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own rescue from the mugging and the long walk, Gloria sees the two
children and steps into the road: “It didn’t seem to me that I was in the
same body anymore,” she recalls. “I had a quickness.” Tillie remem-
bers Corrigan “coming out to the street with a muscle in his step,” and
now Gloria is stepping out into the same street in Claire’s shoes with
her own renewed sense of purpose, intent on rescue. “I used to think
it had all ended sometime long ago,” she remembers, “that everything

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was wrapped up and gone. But nothing ends. If I live to be a hundred
I’ll still be on that street.”52
In jail, just before she kills herself, Tillie remembers the moment
of Corrigan’s attempted rescue. “I remember it like yesterday,” she
says, “getting arrested.” Now here Gloria takes over the rescue and
this time successfully saves the children. She, too, will always “be on
that street,” realizing that “nothing ends”—­deciding, in fact, to move
forward, “Forward, forward let us range, / Let the great world spin
for ever down the ringing grooves of change.” Thirty-­two years later,
one of the two children will take up the same refrain: “For the mighty
wind arises, roaring seaward, and I go.”

I n the S pac e Betwee n

This mixed-­together, many-­New-­Yorks aspect of the novel’s fictional
setting, threaded through with repeated images of dust and graffiti
and small personal mementoes, can be thought of as a literary ver-
sion of “third space,” a dimension envisioned by Homi Bhabha as
a “space produced by processes that exceed the forms of knowledge
that divide the world into binary oppositions.”53 In English-­language
geography, the idea of a “third space” is primarily associated with the
work of Edward Soja, particularly his book Thirdspace: Journeys to Los
Angeles and Other Real-­and-­Imagined Places.54 Building on the work
of spatial theorist Henri Lefebvre and scholars working in postcolonial
studies, Soja offered his version of third space as a way of envisioning
and articulating the space in which “everything comes together,” not
just the subjective and the objective, the abstract and the material, but
also the real and the imagined.55 If “first space” is “the formal arrange-
ment of things in space” and second space “representations and con-
ceptions of space,” then third space is “a meeting ground, a site of
hybridity.”56 Fictional setting, which is always a coming-­together of
the real and the imagined, is in this sense also a third space: a hybrid
space made up of both fact and fiction.
This view of literary setting as a mixed space of fact and fiction,
the knowable and the imagined—­ while resisted by many readers

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 The Great World ’s New York 67

who assume local knowledge and are offended by “inaccuracy”—­is

relatively conventional. The third space view of literary setting is
commonly understood by literary geographers to work in two direc-
tions: on the one hand, fictional settings are routinely approached as a
blending of fact and fiction, while on the other hand, actual locations
have been studied—­most notably in work on literary tourism—­as
material places in part constituted out of their literary associations.

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These associations make a literal, physical impact on a place, and they
also play a major role in how that place is experienced. To take one
well-­known example, many tourists are inspired to visit the UK city of
Bath because of its connections with the life and work of Jane Austen;
when they travel to Bath, they bring their knowledge of Austen’s life
and novels with them, and they frequently search out the places where
they can imagine the author having lived, or plot events having taken
place: there is even an iPhone/iPod application available with audio
commentary, Regency-­era music, and photographs to guide visitors
around the city. At the same time, Bath itself has been physically influ-
enced by its literary connections with Austen: there is a permanent
Jane Austen Centre, for example, and an annual Jane Austen festival.
In 2012, this festival lasted for nine days and included more than sixty
events; with many visitors dressing in Regency costume, the streets of
the city are visibly transformed.
For all these reasons, it is problematic to make a clear-­cut distinc-
tion between real and imagined places, fictional settings and actual
locations. In Chapter 7, I will push the conventional understanding
of literary setting as a blend of the real and the imagined a little fur-
ther, by incorporating the dimension of intertextuality and thereby
suggesting that in the event of the novel, the inclusion of references
and links to other texts, and the ability of readers to notice those con-
nections, complicates the notion of setting even more. In fact, readers
may make intertextual connections that were not deliberately inserted
in the text by the author at all. The New York setting of The Great
World is in this sense not only a blend of verifiable reality (e.g., street
names and buildings) with the extrapolated and the invented (e.g.,
the interior of Claire and Solomon’s apartment) but also a blend of
its own version of New York and the various other real/imagined
versions of New York that exist in fiction. Through the agency of the
author or the reader—­or indeed both together, collaborating—­in the
text event, these other literary New Yorks intersect and become copre-
sent in literary space with the New York inhabited by Ciaran and Lara
and the other characters of The Great World.

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 Chapter 5

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Narrative Space

T he reading of The Great World offered in this book, as an example

of practice in literary geography, is the result of one reader’s interac-
tion with a novel. As a whole, the study explores the idea that the liter-
ary work can be understood to happen collaboratively in this way, one
reader at a time, repeatedly, as each reading generates the event out
of multiple contexts and connections. Like place, I have been argu-
ing, fiction happens in space, is the product of interrelations, emerges
in the dimension of coexistence, and is always in a state of becom-
ing. Significantly, both the argument and the terms in which I am
making that argument are themselves the products of interrelations—­
this potentially useful place-­fiction parallel having originally occurred
to me as I was in the process of reading and rereading the work of
Doreen Massey. Even the phrasing here—­space, interrelations, coex-
istence, becoming—­depends on Massey’s work, and so my reliance on
her terms forms an intertextual connection that many literary geogra-
phers would recognize immediately. And I borrow this phrasing not
just because I think it works well but also to throw a wire across aca-
demic distance and acknowledge the impact that Massey’s writings
have had on my readings.
What this means specifically is that my reading of The Great World,
described in this book, has been modulated by my reading of the work
of Doreen Massey. Her writing has been woven into my reading, and
then both her writing and my reading have been reconfigured into
my writing; and this is true not just of Massey’s writing but also of the
writings of many other geographers and spatial theorists. As a result,
my reading of The Great World—­my reading of any fiction—­tends to
be performed in the context of a set of textual interrelations that have

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70 Literary Geographies

a particular shape, a shape something like a multicentered web with

nodes and hubs forming at particular points where lines meet and dis-
perse. In this reading world, the global city hubs are almost all works
of geography. As a result, I read in a particular way: I read The Great
World, for example, noticing how it writes New York, how it writes a
world, how it produces literary space in the process of forming its own
intertextual hub by pulling references in and spinning them out again.

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In other words, I read for space—­a particular kind of space. I read
in this way, spatially, not only because I read a lot of geography but
also because I have typically written for, or to, a geographical audi-
ence. My sense of that audience has developed of course in part from
my reading: how do geographers write? Articles and books provide
clues of course but so do calls for papers, mailing lists, online discus-
sions, blogs, job advertisements, and grant proposals. My audience
aim has also been refined by comments I have been given by refer-
ees and editors on submitted papers. My point here is that the active
practice of “writing for geographers” has had a direct influence on
my reading: to a certain extent, I think I now read like a geographer.
In this chapter, I’m moving this reading practice away from a view
of The Great World organized according to identifiable locations to
consider the question of how the novel writes space. As the phrase
“writes space” suggests, I have an understanding of geographical space
that has been heavily influenced by recent work in geography and spa-
tial theory. So the shift in emphasis from locations to space reflects a
specific change in metageography, which is to say, a move away from
an understanding of the world as a set of places located on a fixed spa-
tial grid and toward an understanding of the world as a set of elastic
networks, distances, and relations, with place happening in space as a
here and now made up of multiple and interacting theres and thens.
In other words, it is an understanding that assumes, as Marcus Doel
puts it, that space is neither “‘behind’ something, functioning as a
backcloth, ground or continuous and unlimited expanse . . . nor . . .
‘between’ something, as either a passive filling or an active medium
of (ex)change.” Doel suggests thinking of space more as a verb than
a noun. “To space—­that’s all. Spacing is an action, an event, a way of
being.”1

The P ro bl em with S pace

The difficulty that arises when talking about “space” in interdisciplin-
ary literary geography comes not from the fact that it is an unfamiliar
or difficult concept but rather from the fact that it is far too familiar

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 Narrative Space 71

and apparently straightforward. As Massey makes clear in introducing

her “argument for revitalising our imagination of space,” “Henri Lefe-
bvre points out in the opening arguments of The Production of Space
(1991) that we often use that word ‘space,’ in popular discourse or in
academic, without being fully conscious of what we mean by it. We
have inherited an imagination so deeply ingrained that it is often not
actively thought. Based on assumptions no longer recognised as such,

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it is an imagination with the implacable force of the patently obvi-
ous. That is the trouble.”2 Not surprisingly, differences in assumptions
about the nature of space are a major problem for interdisciplinary
work in literature and geography, because as Massey has noted, in
referring to “space” and “the spatial,” authors routinely assume “that
their meaning is clear and uncontested,” even though the superficially
common terminology may well be concealing a debate, “which never
surfaces because everyone assumes we already know what these terms
mean.”3 The resulting miscommunication can go so far as to render
even the recognition of difference problematic, and this in turn makes
some interdisciplinary combinations in particular at present practically
impossible. Within work on literature in relation to themes of space
and place, not only are different assumptions about space routinely
taken for granted in relation to questions of narrative, description, and
setting, but even more problematically, while the conceptualization of
space is the subject of ongoing debate in some disciplinary traditions,
in others, the nature of space is assumed to be stable and self-­evident.
This has only recently begun to surface as a problem for liter-
ary geography. A container or backdrop view of space that could be
shared with work in narratology was not incompatible with the kind
of mid-­ twentieth-­century focus in literary geography on descrip-
tions of landscape and region nor with the line of work that emerged
in the 1970s and 1980s, focusing on “an author’s sense of place as
expressed in fictional setting.”4 Furthermore, at a time when region
and landscape, place, setting, and location, were key concepts for liter-
ary geography, there was no collision with the assumption common in
related fields such as narrative theory that space had “no other func-
tion than to supply a general background setting.” According to the
Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, until recently space was
traditionally something “to be taken for granted rather than requir-
ing attention,” “far less essential than the temporal directedness of
the plot.”5 As a result, “if space was discussed at all it was used nega-
tively to mark off setting from story . . . orientation from complicating
action . . . description from narration proper.”6 Thus, until recently,
literary geography and narrative theory were both able to understand

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72 Literary Geographies

space almost exclusively in terms of container frames and fictionalized

representations of actual locations. Space was setting, and setting was
“the fictionalized environment in which the author unfolds the plot
and against which the protagonists are characterized.”’7
This is a view of narrative geography that has no quarrel with Rich-
ard Hartshorne’s view of space, first laid out in The Nature of Geography
(1939) and developed in 1958 in “The Concept of Geography as a

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Science of Space”: “What preoccupied Hartshorne was the recovery
of a line of descent from Kant through Humboldt to Hettner, and
yet the ways in which these writers conceptualized space was never
allowed to become a problem. Hartshorne simply took it for granted
that space (like time) was a universal of human existence, an external
coordinate, an empty grid of mutually exclusive points, ‘an unchang-
ing box’ within which objects exist and events occur, all of which is
to say that he privileged the concept of absolute space . . .”8 Starting
in the mid-­1970s, however, human geographers had begun turning
away from the question “what is space?” to ask—­with David Harvey
in his influential Social Justice and the City—­“How is it that different
human practices create and make use of distinctive conceptualizations
of space?”9 By the mid-­1990s, the focus in literary geography had
itself begun to shift away from the description and representation of
place and region and toward an interest in “the specific geography”
of a work, with geographers starting to ask how literary works “wrote
space.” Literary geography started to expand on its original taken-­
for-­granted foundation in the Hartshornian idea that space is “an
unchanging box,” with the result that the “landscape in literature”
approach, typically focused on fictional setting, became only one of
many lines of work in a rapidly expanding literary geography. Today,
literary geography engages with multiple genres (including drama,
poetry, and fiction), with themes of narrative space, literary space, and
textual space, and with the spatialities of literary creation, production,
promotion, and reception.
The problem for interdisciplinary literary geography now is that
while literary geographers making use of contemporary spatial theory
tend to take space as a contested and unstable term, always open to
discussion and reconsideration, scholars working in some other related
fields hold to the idea of space as a self-­evident phenomenon, some-
thing everybody understands intuitively. Narratologists, for example,
tend toward a view of space compatible with Hartshorne’s empty
grid, concentrating on the establishment of a relatively static spatial
typology. In the Living Handbook of Narratology, for example, Marie-­
Laure Ryan subdivides her entry on space into five clearly distinct,

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 Narrative Space 73

hierarchically organized dimensions, the first and most specific being

“spatial frames,” meaning specific locations.10 The second dimension,
“setting,” is defined as the “general socio-­ historico-­
geographical
environment” within which the action takes place: “a relatively stable
category which embraces the entire text.” The three other spatial cat-
egories are “story space,” “story world,” and “narrative universe.” For
Ryan, these levels, or “laminations,” are grounded in what she terms

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“our intuitive sense of space as the universal container of things,”
and as this suggests, narratology tends to rely on an understanding of
space that is more in tune with a mosaic metageography than a meta-
geography of space as action and event. This is no doubt related to
the way in which the field is defined: as The Living Handbook of Nar-
ratology explains, “Narratology is a humanities discipline dedicated to
the study of the logic, principles, and practices of narrative representa-
tion.”11 But because literary geographers are interested not only in the
representation of space but also in its production, they have become
increasingly focused on narrative not as a representation but as a spa-
tial practice: narrative as spacing, as a performance of space.
A comparison of the entry for “space” in the online Living Hand-
book of Narratology (updated in September 2013) with the equivalent
entry in The Dictionary of Human Geography (2009) reveals a widen-
ing gap between a view of narrative space grounded in narratology
and views of space current in human geography. It is notable, first
of all, that the narratological entry presents “space” as a matter of
linguistics and philosophy, introducing the subject without reference
to work in geography or spatial theory. Ryan opens the entry for the
Living Handbook with the assertion that because space is “an a-­priori
form of intuition [it] is particularly difficult to capture in its literal
sense.”12 Her opening definitions come from the Oxford English Dic-
tionary (OED), which defines space as “the dimensions of height,
width and depth within which all things exist,” and from The Cam-
bridge Dictionary of Philosophy, which provides a more mathematical
and abstract definition thereby, according to Ryan, managing to avoid
the tautology suggested by the OED’s use of the word “within.”
However, Ryan notes that because of the increased level of abstrac-
tion in the definition from The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, it
fails to “capture our intuitive sense of space as the universal container
of things.”
In The Dictionary of Human Geography, meanwhile, Derek Greg-
ory opens the entry on space by emphasizing the variety of ways in
which space has been conceptualized, noting that “the production of
geographical knowledge has always involved claims to know ‘space’

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74 Literary Geographies

in particular ways” and that the “recognition of an intricate connec-

tion between power, knowledge and geography has transformed the
ways in which contemporary human geography has conceptualized
space.”13 Reviewing the history of ways of knowing space in human
geography, Gregory notes that “everything depends on how ‘space’ is
conceptualized,” and this is why space now poses a bigger problem for
interdisciplinary literary geography than it did twenty years ago: it’s

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not just that different scholars define space differently but, even more
problematically, that some start from a fixed notion of space as “an
a-­priori form of intuition,” “a system of dimensions that determines
physical position,” while others start from the assumption that “there
are many ways to think about space beyond picturing it as a ‘surface’
or a ‘container.’”14
In contrast with the range of conceptualizations of space noted by
Gregory, Ryan allows for only two ways to conceive space—­literal and
metaphorical—­and is decisive about the literal/metaphorical binary,
even for fields other than narratology: “When speaking of space in
narratology and other fields, a distinction should be made between
literal and metaphorical uses of the concept.” What this means is that
for narratology, “author-­reader relations, literary-­historical consider-
ations, and intertextual allusions are metaphorical because they fail
to account for physical existence.” All these topics are thus placed
out of bounds as not “really” spatial; meanwhile, for geographers
engaging with literary spatiality, all these topics remain in play. Within
the range of conceptualizations of space covered in the Dictionary of
Human Geography, there is also space as performance, for example,
as a “doing”; space as inseparable from time and thus always forming
a “mobile, processual” space-­time; space as systems of inclusion and
exclusion; and space as the dimension of multiplicity, plurality, and
accidental juxtapositions.
As the gap between narratological and geographical approaches
to the concept of space suggests, interdisciplinary work on literature
and geography needs to place at its leading edge Massey’s warning
about the dangers of referring to “space” and “the spatial” as if “their
meaning is clear and uncontested.” It is simply not the case that “we
[all] already know what these terms mean.”15 And this is the reason I
opened this chapter with some reflection on my own reading habits,
and how they evolved, because I want to emphasize that this chapter
on The Great World’s writing of space is the result of a particular read-
ing event, a collaboration in which my position as reader has been
relationally constructed from earlier readings and writings. A narratol-
ogist would no doubt read space in The Great World very differently,

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 Narrative Space 75

thus producing a very different collaboration and a very different

event. The enormous difficulty with an apparently simple term like
space—­especially when a definition seems self-­evident to some readers
and a topic of interesting debate to others—­arises in conversations
across disciplines, or across the space between modes of reading.
The self-­conscious interrogation of spatial terminology characteris-
tic of contemporary geography can, for example, produce problems if

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the imperative to think and rethink the nature of basic concepts such
as space, place, distance, and scale becomes a source of frustration for
scholars working in other fields. The literary scholar Susan Stanford
Friedman, for example, explains in an essay on spatial poetics and The
God of Small Things that she will make “no distinction between ‘space’
and ‘place’” because “such distinctions (rampant in geography and
social theory) vary considerably and are often contradictory.”16 For
geographers, meanwhile, these distinctions and contradictions are in
themselves interesting and productive, and the point is not to establish
a set of standard definitions; what matters more is the ability to locate
differing definitions in the history of geographical thought and in
relation to differing positions on spatial theory. Massey, for example,
writing in 2005, clearly takes a very different view of place to Yi-­Fu
Tuan, writing in 1977. For Massey, Tuan’s suggestion that “‘space’ is
more abstract than ‘place’” is one of the academic sources of the still-­
common (and for her, problematic) association of place with the local
and the meaningful and space with the global and the abstract. She
also notes the academic, social, and political implications embedded
in the assumption among many social theorists that “place is space
to which meaning has been ascribed.”17 The key point, I think, is to
recognize the contingent nature of that kind of definition, as Ander-
son and Cooper do, for example, in their introduction to Poetry and
Geography: “If place can be defined as a spatial location invested with
human meaning, then the poetics of place refers to the ways in which
such meanings are produced, understood and contested in literary
texts.”18 I have emphasized the “if” and its subsequent “then” here in
order to make the point.
The value for literary geography of a theoretical engagement with
definitions—­of various kinds of space, for example—­is that it provides
the vocabulary and theoretical scaffolding needed to identify and
describe a narrative geography that is quite different to the container
space paradigm of hierarchically scaled frames. Literary geography
depends on theoretical work not only in literary studies and narrative
theory but also in spatial theory and geography, and so the expansion
of the ways in which it has become possible to engage with concepts

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76 Literary Geographies

such as space has enabled additional ways of reading and writing about
the geographies of literary texts. It’s not so much a matter of “not
that, but this” as it is a matter of “that, yes, but also this.” For literary
geography, as indicated previously, the rethinking that has been going
on in the consensus understanding of space within English-­language
cultural geography in the past several decades offers an opening for a
new line of “also this.”

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The key point has been the reconsideration of the assumption of
“an absolute ontology of space [in which] space is understood as a
geometrical system of organization” and the challenging of that sim-
ple view of container space with a relational view, which understands
space “as being constituted and given meaning” through human and
nonhuman practices and interactions.19 The work of spatial theorists
has unsettled the common assumption that events occur in singular,
bordered locations and that locations are unambiguously positioned
in geometric space, and this in turn has led to the destabilization of
the equally common idea that literary setting can only be understood
in terms of a static frame of real-­world locational reference. Recent
developments in spatial theory are in this sense relevant for work in
literary geography because they make it possible to widen the scope
of literary geography from its previously narrow focus on description
and location: working with this reconfigured spatial vocabulary, read-
ers become able to engage with texts not only as narratives of plot
events situated in space but also as a literary recognition of the ways
authors, characters, plot events, and even readers participate in the
making of narrative space—­or as Doel might say, in spacing.
On the trail of this shift in geographical thinking, this chapter’s
interest in the way The Great World writes space is not an interest
in how the novel represents something that already exists, a given
entity named “space.” Rather, it is interested in how the novel writes
space as something permanently under construction, something gen-
erated rather than inhabited, and something that has to be viewed
and engaged with from a range of different perspectives. Following
the geographical assumption that the “‘performance’ of social prac-
tice and the ‘performance’ of space go hand in hand,” that space
is “not fixed but mutable,” this chapter attempts to bring into the
analysis of fictional narrative Marcus Doel’s suggestion to think of
“space as a verb rather than as a noun.”20 In this more elastic world,
space is understood not as the condition within which things happen
and things are located but instead as the result of interaction between
people and places, a relational dimension, always in progress. Space, in
this configuration, is no longer “a practico-­inert container of action”

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 Narrative Space 77

but rather “a socially produced set of manifolds.”21 It is in this sense

that The Great World can be understood to “write” a particular kind
of space, just as it writes a particular version of New York.

S et tings Rev isited

Taking up this emphasis on the ways in which space is produced in the

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event of fiction, this chapter moves away from looking at the narrative
locations in The Great World and turns instead toward the production
of narrative space. We can start by returning to three sections of the
novel summarized in the chapter on narrative locations, the first being
a section narrated from the perspective of the wirewalk artist that is
described in Chapter 3 as being “primarily located somewhere in the
rural west, apparently near the Rocky Mountains, in a cabin and a
meadow where the wirewalker practices.” This simple description has
to be expanded here, as we turn from “setting” to “space” because,
while the events of the section do take place in that location, the nar-
rative generates a more complex sense of space than any description
of literal setting can encompass. The complexity—­the multiplicity—­of
the narrative space readers have to grasp in The Great World is clearly
indicated in this section, as the wirewalker practices his New York
performance far away from the city. As he walks on the wire he has set
up in a meadow near his log cabin, the artist has to be in two places
at once, which is to say, the reader has to be able to place the artist in
two locations simultaneously:

There were times when he was so at ease that he could watch the elk,
or trace the wisps of smoke from the forest fires, or watch the red-­tail
perning above the nest, but at his best his mind remained free of sight.
What he had to do was reimagine things, make an impression in his
head, a tower at the far end of his vision, a cityline below him. He
sometimes resented it, bringing the city to the meadow, but he had to
meld the landscapes together in his imagination, the grass, the city, the
sky.22

In the meadow, he is also in the city; he melds the two places together
in his mind and in his embodied practice. Then as he leaves, he is
again in two places—­en route and yet still there, behind himself:
“He’d look over his shoulder and see that figure, neck-­deep in snow,
waving good-­bye to himself.”
The melding together of the meadow and the city is achieved not
only in the wirewalker’s narrative recreation of the experience of one

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78 Literary Geographies

person being in two places at the same time but also by the double
appearance of a coyote in the novel—­once in the 1970s meadow and
once again in the Bronx in 1996, a scene described by Jaslyn in her
2006 chapter “Roaring Seaward, and I Go.” The effect of the two coy-
ote appearances seems to me to be once again to connect across space
and time, linking the snowy meadow of the wirewalker’s practice to
the dirty streets where Jaslyn’s mother and grandmother had worked.

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Practicing one afternoon, the wirewalker had been “astounded by a
coyote stepping through the snow and jumping playfully just under
his wire.” He leaves to put wood in his stove, and when he returns,
“The coyote was gone, like an apparition.” But it is clear that the coy-
ote was real; the wirewalker sees it again the following day “sniffing
aimlessly around” the spot in the snow where he had fallen and had
had to fight desperately to get out. Ten years before the time of her
narrative, Jaslyn recalls, she had gone back to the Deegan for her only
visit. Parking the rental car, Jaslyn “caught a glimpse of movement
far up the road.” It was a man rising through the roof of a limousine,
stretching to see a coyote “trotting through the traffic.” “It looked
entirely calm, loping along in the hot sun, stopping and twisting its
body, as if it were in some weird wonderland to be marveled at,”
heading toward the city.23
Narrative location is equally complex in the computer hacker’s
chapter—­but more literally and not just in the mind of the central
character. Here the reader has to maintain two settings for the action
in a single narrative moment. While the setting here can be described
as “the Etherwest laboratory in Palo Alto,” throughout the chapter,
action is taking place simultaneously in the basement lab and on the
streets of Manhattan. Characters in both locations are communicat-
ing in real time, via the computer-­to-­pay-­phone hookup, and as a
result, the narrative space becomes quite complicated. On the East
Coast, the spectators are at ground level. On the West Coast, at the
same moment, the programmers are in a basement laboratory. Both
parties are intensely focused on a performer at the same moment 110
stories up in the air, and all the action is connected in real time. The
Palo Alto–­Manhattan connection, the real-­time coincidence of dis-
persed narrative moments connected by a computer-­to-­pay-­phone
connection—­Massey’s “space as simultaneity”—­actually seeps out of
the Palo Alto chapter and into the second wirewalker chapter, as the
artist is being walked across the World Trade Center plaza to a police
car after his arrest: “The squad car was waiting at the end of the steps.
It was strange to revisit the world again: the slap of footsteps, the

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 Narrative Space 79

call of the hot-­dog man, the sound of a pay-­phone ringing in the

distance.”24
The third example of a narrative phase in which a one-­location-­
at-­
a-­
time concept of “setting” is clearly inadequate and in which
readers are asked to hold two places in their minds at the same time
occurs in Adelita’s chapter. This section, too, complicates the idea
of narrative location with simultaneity: in a moment of deep happi-

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ness, Adelita feels motionless and yet able to slip from one time and
place to another, just as the wirewalker had in his moment of intense
concentration:

I know already that I will return to this day whenever I want to. I can
bid it alive. Preserve it. There is a still point where the present, the now,
winds around itself, and nothing is tangled. The river is not where it
begins or ends, but right in the middle point, anchored by what has
happened and what is to arrive. You can close our eyes and there will
be a light snow falling in New York, and seconds later you are sunning
upon a rock in Zacapa.25

These real-­world narrative performances (by author, text, and reader)

of the complexity of space are mirrored within the world of the novel
by McCann’s creation of characters who are themselves open to the
idea that space is something dynamic, contingent, and performed.
The wirewalker’s performance, for example, is not just narrated by
McCann and (perhaps) accepted by readers as a complex spatial event,
but it is understood by characters in the novel in these terms, as some-
thing that creates space as much as it takes place in a particular loca-
tion. Claire, although very ambivalent about the wirewalk and its
willful engagement with danger (“What if he hits somebody down
below?”), still recognizes that what the artist is doing in his “attempt
at beauty” is a way of changing space: “The intersection of man with
the city, the abruptly reformed, the newly appropriated public space,
the city as art. Walk up there and make it new. Making it a different
space.”26 The artist himself experiences his walk in comparable terms:
“His mind shifted space to receive his old practiced self.”27 He was
“inside and outside his body at the same time, indulging in what it
meant to belong to the air, no future, no past.”

“Spac e U nf o l ds as I nter acti on”

McCann thus confirms and asks the reader to collaborate in a com-
plex understanding of setting and space in The Great World not only

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80 Literary Geographies

by creating moments in which the action takes place simultaneously

in different locations but also by creating characters who themselves
understand space as fluid and dynamic. He further confirms it in the
narrative style of the novel as a whole by crisscrossing the story line
back and forth through events and places shared in multiple ways by
multiple characters, thereby performing a recognition of space as the
dimension of simultaneity and interaction. With the choices he makes

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in structuring his narrative, splitting it into 13 separate but entwined
narrative sections, McCann articulates in the novel a view of space
that would be very familiar to contemporary English-­language geog-
raphers. “If time unfolds as change then space unfolds as interaction,”
Doreen Massey has argued; we can think of “space as the dimension
of a dynamic simultaneous multiplicity.”28 In order to make sense of
the story as a whole, readers have to put some effort into sustaining
this dynamic simultaneity as they engage with the text.
It is useful to return here to Massey’s three key propositions about
the nature of space, introduced in the second chapter: (1) it is the
product of interrelations; (2) it is the dimension of coexistence; and
(3) it is always in a state of becoming.29 This comes close, in my read-
ing, to characterizing the narrative space of The Great World. The
literary geography of this novel has more to do with the ways in which
lives and events interrelate than it does with specific fixed settings; its
world is clearly a world of coexistence; and the world in which the
events take place is clearly in a state of becoming. Judge Soderberg,
for example, interacts and coexists directly with six more of the novel’s
main characters. He first appears in Claire’s chapter, as the husband
with whom she has shared the loss of their only son Joshua in Viet-
nam. Later, in his own chapter, he encounters Corrigan, mistaking
him for a pimp, releases Jazzlyn, jails Tillie, and turns to the case of
the wirewalker. In Gloria’s chapter, we learn that he came up with the
“perfect sentence” for the wirewalker:

The D.A. wanted some good publicity . . . Everyone in the city’s talk-
ing about this guy. So we’re not going to lock him up or anything.
Besides the Port Authority wants to fill the towers. They’re half empty.
Any publicity is good publicity. But we have to charge him, you know?
. . . So he pleaded guilty and I charged him a penny per floor . . . I
charged him a dollar ten. One hundred and ten stories. Get it? The
D.A. was ecstatic. Wait ’til you see. New York Times tomorrow.30

Later still in the novel, in Gloria’s chapter, we learn that although Sol-
omon was at first abrupt when introduced to her in the Park Avenue

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 Narrative Space 81

apartment, caught up as he was in the excitement of his own day, he

later apologized, taking time to acknowledge their common loss. “I
miss my boy too sometimes,” he admits. Through these interrela-
tions, Judge Soderberg acts as one of the narrative’s many network
hubs, connecting the New York characters across social distances.
Judge Soderberg also speaks directly to the idea of space as becom-
ing, contributing his understanding of New York “monuments” as

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entities that are transient in material terms but permanent in terms of
shared memory. It is in regard to this point (as noted earlier) that the
judge finds the significance—­the appropriateness—­of the wirewalker
as an element of New York space: “He had said to his wife many times
that the past disappeared in the city. It was why there weren’t many
monuments around. It wasn’t like London, where every corner had a
historical figure carved out of stone.”31 This is why he thinks that the
wirewalker had made “such a stroke of genius”:

A monument in himself. He had made himself into a statue, but a per-

fect New York one, a temporary one, up in the air, high above the city.
A statue that had no regard for the past . . . He figured that the tight-
rope walker must have thought it over quite a bit beforehand. It wasn’t
just an offhand walk. He was making a statement with his body and if
he fell, well, he fell—­but if he survived he would become a monument,
not carved in stone or encased in brass, but one of those New York
monuments that made you say: Can you believe it?32

Not that Judge Soderberg could have known it in 1974, but for read-
ers coming to the newly published novel in 2009, with the towers no
longer standing, the significance of the wirewalker and his short-­lived
performance as a form of remembered monument had intensified
considerably.
Coincidence and simultaneity are key narrative strategies, both
essentially spatial, that McCann uses in partnership with his read-
ers to establish narrative coherence in his kaleidoscopic story, and
they are also strands woven into the novel’s thematic emphasis on
the ways in which things and people are connected, on the kind of
human connectivity that holds people and social life together in the
face of overwhelmingly scaled dangers and fear. The precious objects
that Jaslyn carries with her when she travels, for instance, include a
lock of her sister’s hair and also some pearls; perhaps these are Glo-
ria’s pearls, and perhaps they are the same pearls Lara noticed on the
“large, middle-­aged lady” she met at the elevators in the projects back
in 1974 when she was taking Corrigan’s personal effects to Ciaran.33

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82 Literary Geographies

Jaslyn’s mementoes also include the photograph that in the fictional

world was taken by Fernando: “She often wonders what it is that
holds the man so high in the air. What sort of ontological glue? Up
there in his haunted silhouette, a dark thing against the sky, a small
stick figure in the vast expanse. the plane on the horizon. The tiny
thread of rope between the edges of the buildings. The bar in his
hands. The great spread of space.”34

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Jaslyn is aware that the photograph was taken on the day her
mother died; she is drawn to the photograph in part because it is evi-
dence for her that, at any moment, destruction and creativity coexist.
It was one of the reasons she was attracted to it, the “fact that beauty
had occurred at the same time” that her mother was about to die.35
But it also seems that she appreciates the photograph because of the
way it shows beauty occurring in the same place at different times: the
wirewalker’s creative moment in 1974 and the destructive moment
of 2001: “A man high in the air while a plane disappears, it seems,
into the edge of the building. One small scrap of history meeting a
larger one. As if the walking man were somehow anticipating what
would come later. The intrusion of time and history. The collision
point of stories. We wait for the explosion but it never occurs. The
plane passes, the tightrope walker gets to the end of the wire. Things
don’t fall apart.”36 At the start of the final chapter—­the chapter that
completes the weaving across space and time of the novel’s many
threads—­Jaslyn’s narrative explicitly draws attention to this theme.
Places and people are connected by stories, images, histories, and
memories—­and not just connected but also constituted out of those
connections.
Two of the key locations in the novel, for example, are New York
and Dublin, and as the narrative threads back and forth between these
two places, it connects them and, at the same time, suggests how
Dublin is part of New York and New York part of Dublin. As Massey
explains, it is possible to understand place in precisely these terms,
using the idea that “what gives a place its specificity is not some long
internalized history but the fact that it is constructed out of a particu-
lar constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at
a particular locus.”37
Space, then, as interrelations, as coexistence, as a dimension always
in the process of becoming, something actively sustained and never
conclusively established: these are key aspects to the space of The Great
World that for me emerge in narrative articulations of connections
and networks. The geography of The Great World also involves coin-
cidences, impermanence, relational (rather than absolute) distances,

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 Narrative Space 83

verticality, depth, and the interaction of code (software) and space.

The prominence these spatial themes have in my reading of the
novel—­emphasizing as they do the interrelations and the simultane-
ity of its narrative space—­has two main results. First, I think reading
spatially could enable readers to hold the novel’s 13 chapters together
as a coherent whole, with characters and events connecting and recon-
necting in unexpected ways throughout: Claire’s husband is the judge

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who sentences Tillie to jail; Gloria, Claire’s friend, is the woman who
rescues and raises Tillie’s grandchildren; Jaslyn, one of those children,
goes to Ireland to visit her sister and finds Ciaran, now married to
Lara, the passenger in the car that killed her mother and his brother.
Second, a spatial reading connects the chapters in such a way that
McCann is able to offer his readers not only a multiplicity to his nar-
rative but also an overall coherence across three decades, while at the
same time, enabling a spatial coherence in the wide-­ranging themes
and locations of the fictional world—­most obviously the novel’s New
York scenes—­thereby providing readers with the opportunity to imag-
ine that world also as a comprehensible whole, despite its vast variety
and instability.
So while McCann creates a narrative metageography for his novel
that in my reading emphasizes relational space more than distinct
locations and specific settings, he also manages to make this space
the keynote to the setting. “One of the points of this novel,” Nathan
Englander has pointed out in conversation with McCann, “is that,
no matter how many worlds New York contains within it, it’s really
a wonderful, singular unified city.” Englander explains that the novel
does this with its opening—­“we all look up at the sky together”—­just
as it does it by “weaving all the grieving mothers together at Claire’s
house, all those mothers and all those lives.” McCann agrees with
Englander: “Nine million stories taking place at any one time. Imag-
ine the music.”38
McCann’s New York is in this way a particular kind of setting: a
place that embodies what Doreen Massey has called “a global sense of
place.” McCann has spoken of how he “wanted it to be a Whitman-
esque song of the city, with everything in there—­high and low, rich
and poor, black, white, and Hispanic. Hungry, exhausted, filthy, viva-
cious, everything that this lovely city is. I wanted to catch some of that
music and slap it down on the page so that even those who have never
been to New York can be temporarily transported there.”39
This shifts the emphasis away from “container space” and geomet-
ric distances—­exactly where this or that event takes place, the sort
of literary geography analyzed in gazetteers and conventional literary

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84 Literary Geographies

cartography—­and toward a relative space of networks and connec-

tions that is much more of a challenge to depict cartographically. This
is important not only as a way of reading the novel but also as a way of
seeing how fiction can participate in partnership with emerging spatial
technologies or forms of cartography in making new ways of thinking
about space possible for nonspecialists. Nigel Thrift has argued that
the new spaces being “imagined into being” in the reinvention of

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spatial technologies are “profoundly political acts” because “what we
think of as ‘abstract’ conceptions of space are a part of the fabric of
our being, and transforming how we think those conceptions means
transforming ‘ourselves.’”40 A useful term to employ here in talking
about nonspecialist geographical knowledge is geosophy, coined by
the geographer J. K. Wright in an article published in the Annals of
the Association of American Geographers in 1947, “Terrae Incognitae:
The Place of Imagination in Geography.” Wright uses the term to
talk about “the geographical ideas, both true and false, of all manner
of people—­not only geographers, but farmers and fishermen, busi-
ness executives and poets, novelists and painters.”41 The Great World,
because it enables a collaborative text event in which narrative space
emphasizes networks and connections rather than locations and set-
tings, has an important geosophical effect: the potential to alter, or at
least nudge out of familiar patterns, the ways its readers think of space.
This, Thrift would suggest, is a politically significant function.

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 Chapter 6

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Distances

B ecause of the longstanding popular interest in literary gazetteers

such as Malcolm Bradbury’s Atlas of Literature, and more recently
because of the wide-­ranging impact of Franco Moretti’s 1998 Atlas of
the European Novel 1800–­1900, it is often assumed by nongeographers
that literary geography must involve the making of maps. Indeed, for
Moretti, the making of maps was the point: “You select a textual fea-
ture . . . find the data, put them on paper—­and then you look at the
map.”1 Literary maps have been used by literary cartographers in this
way to connect stories with places and to express in two-­dimensional
visual form some of the spatial aspects of narratives. The “distant read-
ing” approach characterized by Moretti’s Atlas relies on the collation
of large amounts of quantitative data and works with accumulations
of fictional settings, “textual features,” and plot events. It cannot,
however, cover the whole range of what is possible for literary geog-
raphy, not least because one of the drawbacks to conventional literary
maps is the difficulty they have in dealing flexibly with distance. When
story events are located on a fixed-­scale map, relational (as opposed
to literal) distances disappear, no matter how significant those vari-
able distances are to the text; networks can only be represented as
spread-­out webs made up of connections linking points across literal
distances, and the space-­folding effects of technology and modes of
modern communication become invisible.
It is intriguing to attempt to envision a cartographic alternative:
how would it be possible, say, to map The Great World in such a way as
to show the interaction, the relational proximity, of the programmers
in Palo Alto, the bystanders beneath the World Trade Center, and the
wirewalker, 110 floors above?2 The programmers, the bystanders, and

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86 Literary Geographies

the artist are not only part of the same story, at the same moment,
but also, despite their physical distance, participating together in the
event. How could this be shown on a map? Various kinds of distance,
various kinds of network, and the social impact of communication
technologies are all not only themes within The Great World but also
key spatial aspects to the way the novel has been written, and none
of them are susceptible to the kind of cartographic representation

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currently characteristic of the “distant reading” approach to literary
geography.
So the aim in this chapter is to explore, in contrast to the mapping
practices of literary cartography, a “close reading” approach to spatial
aspects to the novel—­distance, networks, code/space—­that disappear
in conventional literary maps. The literary geography of The Great
World affords this kind of close reading because distances are themati-
cally so important, not just to the everyday experiences of the novel’s
characters but also to the ways in which collisions, connections, sep-
arations, and networks function structurally in the novel, drawing
attention to questions of human connectedness and care. Even at the
most mundane level, distance is a realistically significant aspect to the
lived geographies of the novel’s characters. To take a trivial example,
the taxi journey that concludes Ciaran’s journey from John F. Ken-
nedy Airport to his brother’s apartment articulates in a realistic way
an everyday frustration that would be familiar to many readers and at
the same time draws attention to the importance of various kinds of
distance in the fictional world of the novel itself. Already in the Bronx,
Ciaran gives the taxi driver the address of Corrigan’s apartment on a
piece of paper, and they set off; half an hour later, they pull up. “We
had been driving in elaborate circles,” Ciaran realizes. “Twelve bucks,
bud,” the driver tells him, and Ciaran thinks to himself, “No point in
arguing.”3 How should we measure the distance of Ciaran’s journey
from Dublin to John F. Kennedy Airport, to the Bronx by bus and
then subway, and then—­circuitously—­to the high-­rise tenements of
the projects? In miles, in cash, in time, in knowledge, in socioeco-
nomic difference?

L i ter al and Rel atio nal Di stances

In the same city, but in a very different neighborhood and a very dif-
ferent apartment building, on Park Avenue, Claire understands some-
thing about relational distance as she contemplates her loneliness and
mourns her absent son Joshua. Worrying and wondering how the
other members of the bereaved mothers’ group will react to her Park

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 Distances 87

Avenue penthouse when they meet there for their coffee morning, she
reassures herself with the notion that “it’s only an apartment anyway.
An apartment. Nothing more.” She wants to makes this clear; even
though it’s an apartment “up there” and Gloria lives in the “horrific
mess” of the Bronx projects, in the same building as Corrigan—­bars
across her windows and rats out by the trash—­Claire is determined
that the distances that separate them, the “elaborate circles,” should

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be unimportant, the proximities that join them vital: better to be con-
nected, to act on the care they can offer each other, than to be alone.
“Let me tell you, Gloria,” she thinks to herself, “the walls between
us are quite thin. One cry and they all come tumbling down. Empty
mail slots. Nobody writes to me.”4 The mothers’ group, and especially
Gloria—­who will become her great friend, her other half—­are the
answer to those empty mail slots.
When the mothers eventually do meet at her apartment, Claire
feels both connected and separated: she is with the others and yet
apart from them at the same time. “Sitting here, absent from them,”
she thinks to herself.5 Just a few pages earlier, she had gone into the
kitchen to get a vase for the flowers Gloria had brought: she “reaches
high into the top cupboard and pulls out the Waterford glass. Intri-
cate cut. Distant men do that.”6 This is a detail that clicks neatly into
the specific geography of the novel, in which New York and Ireland
are so interwoven: the distant men of Waterford are in Ireland and
therefore—­in this novel—­not so distant at all. In The Great World,
Ireland is where Ciaran and Corrigan grew up, where Ciaran will buy
back his boyhood home and move in with Lara, and where Jaslyn will
visit them. Years before that, Ciaran had gone to a neighborhood bar
in the Bronx with his brother, who “sat at the counter, raised two
fingers, ordered a couple of beers,” and transported him back to his
hometown: “The flap of our childhood letter box opened. Opening
the door to the spray of sea.”7
Distances in The Great World thus rise to attention throughout: in
events (the taxi ride), objects (the Waterford vase), images (the letter
box), and social situations (the mothers’ group). In that sense, it is
possible to see how, in Brosseau’s terms, The Great World “generates
norms, particular modes of readability, that produce a particular kind
of geography.”8 The geography of the novel is laid out, crumpled, and
stretched by various kinds of distance and proximity that function as
folds and fissures in the novel: the wirewalk, for example, is all about
the bridging of impossible distance, as—­less literally—­is Gloria’s fear-
less moment of connection when she takes Janice and Jaslyn into her
care. Corrigan’s impossible but necessary relationship with Adelita at

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times demands that Ciaran acts as a barrier, creating the relational

distance between them that they need. The priest and the nurse are
frantically close and yet agonizingly distant through much of the nar-
rative; on the one hand, Corrigan loves her, and on the other, he is
bound by his vows of celibacy. Ciaran advises his brother to leave
the Order or leave Adelita. Corrigan is unable to choose: “I can’t
do either,” he says. “I can’t do both.” Faced by this impossibility,

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Ciaran is needed just to keep things stable: they “needed me there,”
he explains. “I was still the safe border between them.” Where Ciaran
creates a safe distance, Corrigan provides a bridge. On the day of the
wirewalk, when Ciaran takes Adelita, her two children, and the old
people in her care to the beach in a rented van, “A bridge lay between
us, composed almost entirely of my brother.”9
Later on the same day, a disastrous removal of distance provides
another nodal connecting point for the story’s various trajectories
when Lara and Blaine’s car clips the back of the van Corrigan is driv-
ing: despite being just “the gentlest tap,” it still creates enough havoc
to kill both of the van’s occupants. Having brought the car and the van
together, disastrously, the ripples from the collision then circle around
to bring Lara and Ciaran together, literally but not emotionally, at
first, then later in reconciliation, and then eventually in partnership,
back in Ireland, back in Ciaran’s childhood home. And of course,
the spinning out from the collision doesn’t come to its conclusion in
the novel until Jaslyn, one of the children taken in by Gloria, visits
her sister, now stationed with the US military in Ireland, and once
there sets out to find Ciaran (and Lara) in Dublin. Lara draws Jaslyn
into an embrace, holding her “for a moment longer than expected:
she smelled of paint.”10 The disastrous collision on the FDR, with
Lara and Blaine’s car loaded with unsold artwork, spins down to this
embrace in a garden in Dublin and its aroma of paint.

Emotional Engagements
Gloria and Claire, of course, both “live in New York.” But what brings
them together is not a physical proximity but a relational proximity;
their connectedness is not place based, not the result of living in the
same building or neighborhood or meeting each other at the super-
market. Instead their connection is achieved across distance, through
engagement with various forms of network, created out of a shared
determination to transcend physical and social distances to care for
the other and find solace in her presence. Given the way The Great
World is structured, it is part of the representation of this version

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 Distances 89

of New York City that the characters’ lives intersect by coincidence

and accident, perhaps only for a moment. Lara finds herself suddenly
involved with Corrigan and Jazzlyn, caring about what happened to
them, then compelled to connect with their families as the result of a
fatal and momentary coincidence. The collision initiates a major break
in her life trajectory, leading to her leaving Blaine and her past life
to engage instead with Ciaran and her future. The hackers in Ether-

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west engage emotionally with the wirewalker and his audience despite
being on the other side of the country, “blue-­boxing through the
computer” to pay phones in Manhattan. In prison, Tillie relives the
week she spent with a small, fat, bald, brown client in the Sherry-­
Netherland: two people brought together by a collision of chance and
need, Tillie and the man who speaks to her of lemon trees in Syria care
for each other, for a time. Corrigan shows up in the Deegan direct
from Naples, “shipped off to New York” by his religious order, against
his will: “He had to go where he was sent,” devote his energy to the
people he is sent to care for, while Ciaran arrives from Dublin, pro-
pelled out of Ireland by a bomb. “I was walking along South Leinster
Street into Kildare Street,” he remembers, “when the earth shook.”
He is knocked through the air and into a fence and then, arrested for
the marijuana in his pocket, he ends up in front of a judge who “gave
me a lecture, and sent me on my way. I went straight to a travel agency
on Dawson Street, bought my ticket out.”11 Two violent disruptions
prompt major breaks in Ciaran’s life trajectory: first, the Dublin bomb
hurls him out of Ireland toward his brother, and second, the car crash
on the FDR highway propels him into his relationship with Lara and,
eventually, back to Ireland.

Literal Proximity, Relational Distance

Relational proximity, often the result of coincidence, is in this way
one important aspect of distance in The Great World. The opposite—­
relational distance combined with literal proximity—­is equally impor-
tant: the scene in which Gloria brings the children to visit Tillie in
jail, for example, provides a painful counterweight to the redemp-
tive scene in which Gloria folds into nothing the distance separating
her from Jazzlyn’s babies. Just as Ciaran’s cab driver took forever to
go practically no distance at all, so in this scene Tillie is close to her
grandchildren but at the same time hopelessly far away from them.
Tillie doesn’t know exactly who Gloria is—­she looks at her and sees “a
big black woman, long white gloves on her and a fancy red handbag.”
She realizes that she “knew her face from the projects” and that she

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has seen her in the elevators: “I always thought she was a square, used
to stand in the elevator and turn away.”12 But as soon as Tillie sees the
babies, she runs to the glass wall separating the inmates from their
visitors and sticks her hands into the opening at the bottom. The chil-
dren, not recognizing her, snuggle closer to Gloria and look over her
shoulder away from Tillie: “I kept saying, ‘Come to Grandma, come
to Grandma, let me touch your hands.’ That’s all you can do through

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the bottom of the glass—­they got a few inches and you can touch
someone’s hands. It’s cruel. I just wanted to hug on them. Still they
wouldn’t budge—­maybe it was the prison duds.”13 Gloria explains
to Tillie that she is fostering the children; that they live together in
Poughkeepsie now, with “a nice house and a nice fence”; and that
the girls have a nice room that has painted baseboards and “wallpaper
with umbrellas on it.” Tillie’s granddaughters are so close to her in
this scene and yet so distant: “When the bell rang she held the babies
across to kiss me, against the glass. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the
smell of them coming in through the little slot at the bottom of the
glass, so delicious. I poked my little finger though and little Janice
touched it. It was like magic. I put my face against the glass again.”14

Literal Distance, Relational Proximity

Distances, in the narrative space of The Great World, are in this way
very flexible. While in some cases, locations and people are relation-
ally distant but physically close (Tillie and her granddaughters, sepa-
rated by the glass screen), in others they are relationally close despite
being physically distant (the programmers on the West Coast, some-
how present in Manhattan). Even after the performance, when the
programmer can’t get anyone to pick up the phone, the connection
lingers: in Palo Alto, the Kid perseveres, hitting the enter key on his
keyboard again and again, “but it just rings and rings and rings . . .
it just keeps ringing,”15 while the artist hears “the sound of a pay
phone ringing in the distance” as he is taken in handcuffs to the squad
car.16 The fact that the programmers in California are able to hear,
literally, what’s happening in Manhattan (“A big round of applause
goes up in the background”) is a clue to the way in which the novel’s
1970s chapters emphasize the role technology plays in changing the
meaning and measuring of distance. At a very simple level, the poten-
tial to mediate distance with technology is suggested by the fact that
one of the bystanders who talks to Compton, one of the program-
mers, on the telephone happens to have opera glasses in her hand-
bag. Compton and “opera-­glasses woman” get into the kind of casual

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 Distances 91

conversation they might have had if they were standing next to each
other on the sidewalk: “How can you see him so clearly?” Compton
asks, and the woman replies, “Glasses . . . I’m watching him through
glasses.” “You’ve got binoculars?” asks Compton. “Well, yes, opera
glasses . . . I went to see Makarova last night. At the ABT. I forgot
them. The glasses, I mean. She’s wonderful by the way. With Barysh-
nikov.”17 The Kid, Sam Peters, somehow bonds with opera-­glasses

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woman, who turns out to be a 29-­year-­old librarian: “I don’t know
why, it feels like she’s my aunt or something, like I’ve known her a
long time, which is impossible.”18 Sam hears what’s happening: “A
great big noise all around her and whooshing and cheering and it’s
like everything has become undone and is lapsing into babble, and I
think of all the thousands off the buses and the trains, seeing it for the
first time, and I wish I was there, with her, and I get a wobbly feeling
in my knees.”19
Here Sam is emotionally present at the scene despite the physical
distance: his knees go wobbly, and he can’t resist asking the opera-­
glasses woman if she’s married. All this is possible in real time because
of the computer–­pay phone connection, and this provides one of the
novel’s examples of the ways in which emergent 1970s technologies
were beginning to mediate distance. Sam had learned how to place
himself in two locations at the same time when he built his first crystal
radio at the age of seven: “It only got one station, but that didn’t mat-
ter I listened late at night under the covers. In the room next door I
could hear my folks fighting.”20 He also explains how he experiences
the spatiality of writing code:

See, when you’re programming . . . the world grows small and still.
You forget about everything else. You’re in a zone. There are no back-
ward glances. The sound and the lights keep pushing you onwards.
You gather pace. You keep on going. The variations comply. The sound
funnels inwards to a point, like an explosion seen in reverse. Everything
comes down to a single point. It might be a voice recognition pro-
gram, or a chess hack, or writing lines for a Boeing helicopter radar—­it
doesn’t matter: the only thing you care about is the next line coming
your way. On a good day it can be a thousand lines. On a bad one you
can’t find where it all falls apart.21

In the Etherwest chapter, as in the case of Joshua’s work at the Palo

Alto Research Center, the narrative is describing the early stages of a
technologically inflected dimension, which Rob Kitchin and Martin
Dodge have called “code/space.” Kitchin and Dodge’s article “Code

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and the Transduction of Space,” which focuses on the spatial impact

of software code, presents a series of case studies in order to analyze
“the effects of code on daily life and the production of space” and
explain “the difference code makes through an interrogation of the
relationship between technology, society, and space.”22 They argue
that “the effects of software (code) on the spatial formation of every-
day life are best understood through a theoretical framework that uti-

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lizes the concepts of technicity (the productive power of technology
to make things happen) and transduction (the constant making anew
of a domain in reiterative and transformative practices).”23

C ode, S pac e, and Distance

Claire’s son Joshua is working at PARC in California when he is asked
to go to Vietnam to develop software that will count casualties: “The
president wanted to know how many dead there were.” So Joshua is
sent to the war zone as part of “a crack computer unit,” the “Geek
Squad.”24 Joshua and his friends from PARC had been developing
the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, the ARPANET,
the original core network that would later be developed into the
World Wide Web. The idea to create such a network was only about
a decade old at the time, and the first ARPANET message had only
been sent about five years before the Petit wirewalk, in 1969. Just as
the transcontinental telegraph had dramatically changed communica-
tions technologies and national space a century earlier, in the 1860s,
the emergence of computer networks in the 1960s and 1970s had an
enormous social and spatial impact, most obviously in the reduction
of relative distance in communications.
Perhaps because of Joshua’s involvement in software programming
and electronics, Claire feels connected to her son through the global
electrical infrastructure. Joshua, convinced that he is working “at the
cusp of human knowledge,” writes to Claire “about the dream of
widely separated facilities sharing special resources. Of messages that
were able to go back and forth. Of remote systems that could be
manipulated through the telephone lines.”25 Coming as it does just
pages before Claire sends her letter through the mail to Marcia, in
response to the personal ad, the narrative seems to me to be drawing
attention here to the sociospatial significance of these different forms
of network. The two are even pushed together virtually, in literal
proximity, on Claire’s fridge, among her clippings: “Computer arti-
cles. Photos of circuit boards. A picture of a new building at PARC.
A newspaper article about a graphics hack. The menu from Ray’s

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 Distances 93

famous. An ad from the Village Voice.”26 Claire has only a vague idea
of how Joshua’s linked computers worked, how the actor-­network
held together, but still, for her “it was as if she could travel through
the electricity to see him”:27

She could look at any electronic thing—­television, radio, Solomon’s

shaver—­and could find herself there, journeying along the raw voltage.

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Most of all it was the fridge. She would wake in the middle of the night
and wander through the apartment into the kitchen and lean against
the freezer . . . she could gaze past the wires, the cathodes, the transis-
tors, the hand-­set switches, through the ether, and she could see him
all of a sudden she was in the very same room, right beside him, she
could reach out and lay her hand on his forearm, console him, where he
sat under the fluorescents, amid the long rows of desks and mattresses,
working.28

Joshua does literally use the network to contact Claire, phoning her
at strange hours of the day, “long, looping calls that had an echo to
them.”29 To do this, Joshua uses the same kind of program that the
Etherwest programmers used to put calls through to the pay phones
near the World Trade Center. Joshua tells Claire that the calls don’t
cost him any money: he “said he had tapped into the lines, routed
them down through the army recruiting number just for fun.” He
tells her the system is there to be exploited, and she listens intently to
his voice. His calls become fewer as he gets busier with more electronic
postings, “more nodes on the electronic net.” He is struggling with
hackers, peace protesters, who are trying to break into their machines
to “chew away parts of their program.” “The world was bigger and
smaller both,”30 he tells Claire, in an explicit narrative acknowledg-
ment of the impact of code/space on distance.
Joshua is working on what he calls the Death Hack: sorting out
the dead, the ones gone AWOL, the mistakes, the secret squadrons,
“the ones who got married in little rural villages,” and the ones who
just disappeared. Joshua does his best to include all of them in his
program: he “created a space for them so that they became a sort of
alive.”31 A few pages later in Claire’s chapter, she talks of how the wire-
walker is creating new public space, making something new, “making
it a different space.”32 Just before this passage comes Claire’s mental
comment on the crystal vase: “Distant men do that.” Not surprisingly,
with a son far away in Vietnam and then separated from her even more
conclusively and distantly in death, Claire’s chapter shows a strong
concern with distance: how people can feel close when they are far

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94 Literary Geographies

away and vice versa. As soon as she sees him leave for Vietnam, Claire
feels sure she has lost him; after his death, Claire remembers how she
felt “seeing him go forever”—­and imagines an impossible phone call:
“Hello, Central, give me heaven, I think my Joshua is there.”33 When
the preacher at Jazzlyn’s funeral speaks of how “the dead could come
alive, most especially in our hearts,”34 there seems to me to be an echo
back to this other way of creating space for the dead in life: Joshua

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remembers them in code, while Jazzlyn’s friends remember her in
their memories.

N etwo rk s
Network,—­like space, place, and other key geographical terms—­is a
word used to mean many different things in both specialist and non-
specialist discourse. In current English-­ language geography, there
are perhaps four primary approaches to the term.35 The first refers
to “infrastructural technically based networks” such as road, rail, and
telecommunications systems. The second refers to social networks,
including families, friendships, and communities. Combining these
two aspects, the third approach deals with network-­based “models
of organization,” and the fourth approach is grounded in the line of
work known as “actor-­network theory”—­in other words, “the distrib-
uted forms of agency that emerge from articulation of humans and
non-­humans,” within which it becomes problematic to distinguish
agent from system, actor from network.36 One of the questions raised
by actor-­network theory is the extent to which “entities take their
form and acquire their attributes as a result of their relations with
other entities.”37 So entities “are performed in, by, and through those
relations.”38 And those performances require and generate a particular
kind of networked space, something quite different from “volumetric
or regional performances of space.”39 To me, The Great World seems
to offer three good examples of this kind of space-­performing actor-­
network: a religious order, the mail service, and a group of bereaved
mothers.

The Order
The religious order to which the priest Corrigan belongs can be
understood as a network in relation to all the but the first definition
sketched out previously, in that it has no infrastructural materiality.
It is, however, a widely dispersed social network, a community, and
at the same time, a powerful organization, organized hierarchically.

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 Distances 95

Corrigan stands out in the novel as a powerful individual, someone

who disregards conventions and breaks rules; but he is also, as a mem-
ber of a religious order, part of a structured community and someone
who obeys. And finally, it is difficult to separate Corrigan, the priest,
from the network in which he makes his life and finds his purpose.
The extent, the reach, of this network is clearly important to Cor-
rigan: “He couldn’t be an ordinary priest—­it wasn’t the life for him;

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he was ill defined for it, he needed more space for his doubt.”40 Inside
the Order, Corrigan moves around the world: first to Belgium from
Ireland to join the brotherhood and live a life “of ordinary labor,
friendship, solidarity” and from there to Italy and from there on to
the United States: “He had long angled for a posting somewhere in
the Third World but couldn’t get one . . . He spent a while in the
slums of Naples . . . but then was shipped off to New York in the early
seventies. He disliked the idea, bucked against it, thought New York
too mannered, too antiseptic, but had no sway with those higher up in
his Order—­he had to go where he was sent.”41 As this passage makes
clear, while Corrigan’s order is a community, it is also a strongly hier-
archical network, one with an organizational, decision-­making cen-
tral command. The brothers apparently have little or no control over
their movements within the network. One day when Ciaran is liv-
ing with Corrigan near the Deegan in the South Bronx, “a gentle
knock sounded on the door.” An “older man with a single suitcase”
was there: “Another monk from the Order . . . He had come from
Switzerland.”42 Brother Norbert is completely out of his depth in the
South Bronx: he has his passport stolen in the elevator at gunpoint,
and he is reduced to tears by Jazzlyn and the other streetwalkers who
drop in and out of Corrigan’s apartment. “Corrigan was able to get
Norbert’s passport back and he drove him out to the airport in the
brown van to get a flight to Geneva. Together they prayed and then
Corrigan dispatched him.”43 Under these conditions, it may indeed
be problematic to determine where the actor (Corrigan, Brother
Norbert) ends and the network (the Order) begins, in the sense that
the Order doesn’t preexist the agency of its individual members but
emerges from it and also in the sense that Corrigan’s agency emerges
from his status within the Order rather than from some preexisting
intentionality.44

The Mailman
As Jaslyn reflects on her experiences helping people in Little Rock
after Hurricane Rita, in the novel’s last chapter, she remembers an old

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woman in a hotel room who had been displaced and was not receiving
her pension checks: she had been lost from the network. Separated
from her address and her mailbox, the woman needs Jaslyn to come
into her life, reconnect her, connect with her, and listen to her stories;
this is what Jaslyn does, working with people in temporary accom-
modations “to nullify mortgage payments on a house that has floated
to the sea,” figuring out the tax credits, the loopholes, the pay stubs,

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making phone calls, sorting out the relationship between people and
systems, and letting them talk: “And before they know it, their taxes
are done, the insurance claim is laid out, the mortgage companies
have been noted, the paper is slid across the table for them to sign.
Sometimes it takes them an age just to sign, since they have something
else to say—­they are off and chatting about the cars they bought, the
loves they loved. They have a deep need just to talk, just to tell a story,
however small or reckless.”45
“My boy was the mailman,” the woman had told her, working
“right here in the Ninth. He was a good boy. Twenty-­two years old.
Used to work late if he had to. And he worked, I ain’t lying. People
loved getting his letters. They waited for him. They liked him coming
knocking on the door.”46 Being connected across distance, getting
mail in a mailbox, this is important. “Empty mail slots,” Claire had
lamented in her loneliness. “Nobody writes to me.” But then Claire
had run out into the snowy night in her slippers to dispatch her answer
to the advertisement directly into the mail system and connect herself
to the mothers’ group: “Can’t stop now. Letter in hand. Mother seeks
bones of son. Found in blown-­up café in foreign land.”47
After the storm, the woman’s son didn’t come home. She waits,
and waits, and then goes out looking (mother seeks body of son), but
all she finds is “the sack of mail floating.” Two weeks later, she learns
that his body has been found, high in a treetop. She still has his bag
of mail with her, in the hotel room; she gives it to Jaslyn: “Take it,
please, the woman said. I can’t stand it no more.”48 None of the mail
has been touched; none of it has reached its destination. The weight
of lost connections is too heavy for the woman to bear. Jaslyn takes
the mail out to the lake and sorts it: magazines, flyers, personal let-
ters, and bills. She burns all the bills and keeps the personal mail to be
returned to the postal system, which of course survives the death of
one of its mailmen, as the Order will survive Corrigan’s death in the
car crash, with a note: “This got lost some time ago. I hope it’s okay to
send it on again now.”49
The mailman and the mail service together bring connectedness
into the lives of their customers: the mailman is a mailman because

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 Distances 97

he is a part of the mail system; the postal system functions through its
mail sorters and carriers. The concept of the actor-­network is useful
in this context in thinking of the mail system in The Great World as
one example of a network that produces space and mediates distance.
Arguing that it is in fact more productive to think of actor-­network
theory (ANT) as a “sensibility” than as a theory, one of its founders
calls it “an orientation to the world that brings characteristics into

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view.”50 These characteristics include the role of nonhumans in the
social world—­the idea that agency is a relational effect that is “the
outcome of the assemblage of all sorts of social and material bits and
pieces.” This is why actors are networks, and networks are actors,
and these aspects to networks or actor-­networks are quite evident in
the “personal ad + postal system + people” combination, which col-
lectively enables the bereaved mothers’ community. It would, in the
first place, be quite difficult to separate out the contributions of the
various agents and their various forms of technicity and knowledge
involved in the postal system (e.g., nonhuman and human actors
such as mailmen, mailbags, sorters, sorting offices, vehicles, and so
on). And after that, how could we separate the mothers from the
letters from the delivery system? The connectedness enabled by this
network is achieved despite absolute physical distance (e.g., between
Park Avenue and the Deegan) and also despite distances generated
by differences of class, race, and gender. This small example of an
actor-­network community in The Great World provides a useful liter-
ary articulation of an actor-­network sensibility, particularly as one of
the early criticisms of ANT was that it tended to ignore the structur-
ing impact of precisely those factors—­class, race, and gender.

The Bereaved Mothers

The coffee morning group of grieving mothers articulates in the novel
another example of a network in which interrelations are enabled not
only by combinations of material infrastructure and human staff (the
postal service, the subway system), which afford people the means by
which to find each other and connect across space, but also by those
people themselves, the human agents who use those networks to gen-
erate their small community. It is a combination of newspaper per-
sonal ads and the postal service that enables the creation of the coffee
morning group at which Gloria and Claire first meet. Claire, isolated
in her grief for her son Joshua, finds an advertisement in The Village
Voice: “looking for mothers to talk to. nam vets. p.o. box 667.”
For a while, the clipped ad is simply one fragment in the palimpsest of

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98 Literary Geographies

paperwork stuck to her “hairy” fridge. But then one evening the slips
of paper fall to the floor, and she notices the advertisement again. She
quickly writes a response in pencil, then goes over it in ink, and runs
down Lexington Avenue to the mailbox on Seventy-­Fourth Street in
the middle of a snowstorm, in her nightdress and slippers, to mail it:
“She could have mailed it right downstairs in the lobby but she didn’t
want to.” Mailing the letter, launching herself directly into the net-

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work, she feels a new “lightness” and finds something positive in the
image of her letter “winding its way through the postal system, even-
tually to find another like her. Who would it be, and what would they
look like, and would they be tender, and would they be kind?”51 Glo-
ria, of course, presumably at around the same time but in an entirely
different part of the city, had also found and responded to the ad in
The Village Voice. “I can’t recall what it was led me to the small ad that
was in the back,” she recalls, “but it was there one day, like sometimes
happens, Marcia’s ad.” Gloria tells the story of how she wrote fifty or
sixty versions of her reply, explaining everything about the three sons
she had lost in Vietnam, explaining “how I was a colored woman, how
I was living in a bad place but I kept it real nice and clean,” writing
about her boys, her husbands, and her childhood. In the end, what
she writes and sends is, “Hello, my name is Gloria and I’d like to meet
up too.”52
As a result of Marcia’s advertisement, and the connecting media-
tion of the postal service, five mothers find each other: Claire, Gloria,
Marcia, Janet, and Jacqueline. Claire lives on Park Avenue, Gloria in
the Bronx, Marcia on Staten Island, and the other two on the Lower
East Side. The newspaper ad and the postal system enable them to
overcome to a somewhat workable extent the social and literal dis-
tances that separate them and create a moving space of comfort: taking
advantage of the city’s public transportation system, they meet in each
other’s homes in rotation. Claire’s involvement in the coffee group is
a way of expressing and, to an extent, satisfying her yearning to have
her boy back; she wants to collapse space and time: “Why shouldn’t
our sons be in the room all at once? Collapse all the boundaries.”53 In
a sense, through the creation of the movable location, in which all five
women are able to talk about their lost sons in turn, they do collapse
boundaries, and they do reanimate their boys, in the way the preacher
at Jazzlyn’s funeral describes as “the miracle of the actual world”—­
that “things could be reconstituted and the dead could come alive,
most especially in our hearts.”54

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 Distances 99

L i k e B eing in a Bo dy We D idn’t Know

For Colum McCann, “the core image of the novel”—­the “moment
when the towers get built backup”—­is the image of Gloria stepping
out of the cab that has brought her home from Claire’s apartment
and finding herself claiming Jazzlyn’s children. “Hold on,” she cries
out, and then again, “Hold on,” not only encouraging three-­year-­old
Janice to hold on tight to the antenna of the car, to resist the social

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workers’ attempts to take her away until she can intervene, but also
asking the social workers to hold on, to wait. At that moment, Jan-
ice “let her fingers uncurl” and reaches out, stretching toward Gloria
who is stretching toward her to make a connected and shared future
together: “Nothing felt better than that, not in a long time,” Gloria
recalls.55 McCann has explained that for him this is the moment in the
novel when 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 strang-
ers.”56 In that moment, Gloria feels strangely separated from herself
as she connects with the children: “It didn’t seem to me that I was
in the same body anymore,” she remembers, just as the wirewalker,
midperformance, had “wanted his breath to enter the wire so that he
was nothing. This sense of losing himself.”57 For Lara, too, her critical
moment of collision-­connection is also a moment in which she feels
disconnected from her own body, as if one of the effects of connecting
or colliding is to lift a person out of themselves: Lara comments that
for her and Blaine, being in the car at the time of the crash, “was like
being in a body we didn’t know.”58
Perhaps this is also what happens in the collaborative event of The
Great World: author and reader, connecting with each other and with
their cocreated fictional world, together inhabit a “body we didn’t
know.” At times violent and destructive, at other times healing and
creative, the bridging of distance plays an important role in the nar-
rative spacing of McCann’s novel and also, I would suggest, in the
event of the novel itself, in which as readers we too can rescue and be
rescued by strangers. Ciaran remembers the way his mother used to
begin her stories: “Once upon a time and long ago, in fact so long ago
that I couldn’t have been there, and if I had been there, I could not
be here, but I am here and I wasn’t there, but I’ll tell you anyway.”59
“Why do we so often and so tightly associate care with proximity?”
asks Doreen Massey. “Even those who write of care for the stranger
so often figure that relationship as face-­to-­face. It is the counterpoint
perhaps to the persistent lack of acknowledgment of the strangers who

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have always been within.”60 In the event of the novel, perhaps we are
all strangers within, reaching out for connectedness in a relationship
that is not at all face-­to-­face, not territorial, but still spatial in the sense
that space unfolds as interaction.
Embraces, collisions, the bridging of distances, the faraway brought
close—­these events and themes hold the narrative web of The Great
World together. The characters in the novel do not in any obvious

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way represent a community, and their connections are not the natural
result of neighborliness or literal proximity, but nevertheless, despite
the fact that the links that form the web of the novel are acciden-
tal and unlikely and coincidental, they are still, with a few notable
exceptions, helpful and life affirming. Care for others, connectedness,
loyalty, and empathy are values that tend to be casually associated
with place and place-­based community, and their absence—­alienation,
indifference, isolation—­is often attributed to “placelessness,” to the
loss of neighborhood communities and face-­to-­face interaction in the
metropolis or the “globalized” world. The geography of care in The
Great World, however, fits better with the view of care and responsi-
bility assumed by Doreen Massey when she disputes the idea that it is
the absence of place and place-­based community that leads to discon-
nection and indifference. Massey argues that a sense of responsibility
for and engagement with others does not have to be territorially
inspired. “Perhaps it is not ‘place’ that is missing,” she suggests,
“but grounded, practiced, connectedness.”61 Looking around at
her friends—­Gloria, Marcia, Jacqueline, and Janet—­gathered in her
apartment, Claire experiences “gentleness and courtesy,” all of them
smiling at her. “Even here. On Park Avenue,” she thinks, “we hurt,
and have one another for the healing.”62

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 Chapter 7

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The Intertextual City

T his chapter continues the spatial reading of the case study text, The
Great World, with an expansion of the discussion of literary geography
from the intratextual—­the coherence and connectedness of the space
of the fictional world—­to the intertextual. It explores the idea that
just as New York, the city, happens for people variously in a mixture
of the physical and the social—­the real and present mixed in with
the anticipated and remembered—­so the fictional New York of The
Great World emerges in the collaborative writing-­reading text event as
a complex combination of many copresent fictional and factual New
Yorks. In other words, just as tourists actually visiting New York find
themselves in their own version of a real-­and-­imagined city, so readers
who encounter the fictional New York of The Great World experi-
ence that city as an entanglement of experience, expectations, and
associations.
Tourists drawn to places they have encountered in texts will often
be looking to experience a setting that they feel should be recogniz-
able, and as the discussion of the plastic bag problem in Chapter 4 has
already suggested, New York residents drawn to the novel because it is
set in a city and an era with which they feel familiar will probably want
the fictional setting to correspond with the city they think they know.1
This is not just a question of geographical and historical accuracy;
when readers with personal memories of 1970s New York encounter
the fictional New York City of The Great World, they will bring with
them into the text a dimension of experience and memory that will
itself be subjective. The resulting discrepancies between various ver-
sions of the same city, all of them to some extent personal, easily result
in readings that are highly critical of perceived inaccuracies. This in

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102 Literary Geographies

turn easily leads to the opening up of a relational distance between

reader and text—­for example, in what one reader calls a “knock-­me-­
out-­of-­the narrative” moment—­and as Chapter 10 will show, in some
cases an accumulation of perceived discrepancies becomes so annoy-
ing that a reader will abandon the text halfway through.2
The reader’s encounter with fiction involves multiple spatial dimen-
sions mixed together: not just places visited and maps used but also

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books read, stories overheard, and many more. The 2009 Wall Street
Journal review of The Great World, for example, locates its reading of
the novel in both literary as well as literal space: on the literary side,
the reviewer argues that “Mr. McCann seizes a day of above-­average
strangeness . . . and gives it the Bloomsday treatment.” On the literal
side, he laments its failure to transcribe the New York accent con-
ventionally: “Unforgivably, to a Noo Yawk ear, Mr. McCann bungles
‘Fuhgeddaboudit,’ omitting the essential ‘a’ (yes, he actually has a
character say ‘fuhgeddboutit’). Pointillists of the psyche are like
comedians who do impressions. Pretty good isn’t good enough.”3
Indeed, if you enter “fuhgeddboutit” into a search engine, the first
list of hits will come up under “showing results for fuhgeddaboudit.”
Nevertheless, even though official “Leaving Brooklyn” road signs
have in the past advised exiting drivers to “Fuhgeddaboudit,” with
an a, McCann’s novel is not the only text to use this spelling, and as
the exchange involving the correct pronunciation takes place in the
section narrated by Tillie, there remains some question about whose
(possible) misspelling this is. But the extent to which this is a mistake
is not the point; the reviewer’s indignation is simply a useful indication
of the extent to which disjunctions between a reader’s expectations of
authenticity and a writer’s depiction of a fictional world can derail
their collaboration.
Just as the real New York that exists in people’s memories, let-
ters, photograph albums, and maps is a version of the actual place
in time—­a subjective construction, even when it is shared—­so the
historical setting created by McCann for The Great World is a com-
bination of documentary narrative and fictional invention. On the
reception side, the reader will almost inevitably come to the text, and
that setting, carrying some existing ideas about New York City and
the American 1970s. On the production side, McCann will have gen-
erated his text not only from his lived experience as a resident of New
York but also from his readings, his conversations, and the imaginative
extensions he makes on the basis of his research. Published interviews
with McCann, for example, show that in writing The Great World, he
was engaging with the city in which he lived, in particular with the

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 The Intertextual City 103

traumatic events surrounding the 9/11 attacks, and that in doing so,
he took inspiration and information not only from his surroundings
but also from a range of textual sources, both documentary and liter-
ary. He has recalled how, soon after the destruction of the towers, he
found himself wondering in what way he could make sense of the city
around him and its 9/11 narratives; turning to his reading experi-
ences, he asked himself, as a writer, “How was it possible to create

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an alternative meaning, or more exactly, a novel?” As he searched for
that alternative meaning, which would be realized in the form of a
novel, he recalled how he had read, years earlier, “an essay in Paul
Auster’s The Red Notebooks about the walk that the French tightrope
walker Philippe Petit had made across the World Trade Center towers
in 1974.”4
In McCann’s recollection of the beginnings of his novel, the
potential of the wirewalk as a useful narrative element was already in
his mind in 2001. But by the time he was actually ready to start work
on his “anti-­9/11” novel, the Petit walk had become iconic: there
was Petit’s own memoir, To Reach the Clouds (2002), a children’s
book, The Man Who Walked between the Towers (2003), the James
Marsh documentary Man on Wire (2008), and a play.5 There was also
a wide range of other essays and memoirs, many of them appearing in
the aftermath of 9/11 as memories of the towers began to be recon-
structed in the space left empty by their collapse. All these texts, or at
least all of the texts known to McCann, contributed in some way to
his production of the novel, and for many readers, a significant num-
ber of these texts will also play a part in its reception—­and thereby in
their contribution to the collaborative event of The Great World.
A reader who has seen Man on Wire or read To Reach the Clouds will
obviously have a different experience of the novel from a reader who
has not. Textual evidence suggests that McCann was himself familiar
with both of these references (the documentary and Petit’s memoir)
as well as various works of fiction set in the New York area, although
it is of course possible that he was in fact so familiar with these texts
that some of the echoes were not made consciously. It is on the recep-
tion side, however, once the contribution of the reader becomes part
of the event of the novel, that the depth and range of the intertextual
literary space of The Great World becomes fully enabled. Already in
this study, the contributory roles of author, readers, and other texts to
the event of The Great World has been discussed: as previous chapters
have argued, the novel continues to happen in new ways as multiple
agents and trajectories meet up and interact. So it is important to note
that the intertextual aspect of The Great World’s literary space can

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104 Literary Geographies

include not only texts known to the author that may have impacted
the writing process but also texts known to its readers that may impact
the process of reception. Of course, this process will be unique to each
reading each time the novel happens.
What this means, of course, is that texts unwritten at the time The
Great World was published, texts that could not have formed any
conscious part of McCann’s intertextual frame of reference, will also

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become woven into the event of The Great World in individual read-
ings, as future readers bring their own contexts for understanding
to the novel. Perhaps a new novel based on the events of the Petit
wirewalk will appear, or a new memoir from Petit himself, and in years
to come, these texts will become part of the intertextual reference for
some readers engaging with The Great World. This means that any dis-
cussion of the intertextual geography of The Great World based on a
close reading of the text can never be more than partial, situated, and
time specific. McCann is explicit about the importance of the con-
tributions of his readers to the text event: he insists that “more than
likely, they’re smarter than me, or more courageous, or at the very
least they will continue the book further than I can. They can com-
plete the story.”6 The ways in which McCann’s readers may complete
the story are not only multiple but also in some cases not yet possible.

I ntertex tual N ew York

The particular way in which The Great World’s New York happens as
an event in intertextual literary space, a meeting-­up of literary trajec-
tories, will vary, then, from reading to reading. It seems to me that a
useful way to approach the concept of an “intertextual literary New
York” is to think of it as an even more complex version of the already
complex spatial setting created by China Miéville in his novel The City
and the City (2009).7 The relevant aspect of the complex space of
Miéville’s novel is not, in fact, intertextual; it exists within the novel as
a surreal but coherent setting that within the world of the text is con-
sidered normal. The setting Miéville creates for this novel nonetheless
provides a model for envisioning the multiple possibilities of inter-
textual literary space: for example, in the case of The Great World, it
provides a way of understanding the concept of the multiplicity of the
coexisting New Yorks that cluster and bump into each other in that
novel as a result of intertextual reference. In The City and the City, the
fictional location for the action is literally itself a double space: two
cities (the city Besźel and the city Ul Qoma) are coterminous, occupy-
ing exactly the same geographical location, but they are nevertheless

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 The Intertextual City 105

perceived by their inhabitants to be almost entirely separate. They can

only be understood as copresent from a metageographical perspective
that is practically unthinkable for the general population. This meta-
geographical perspective is obvious to the reader, for whom it is clear
that while the (one) city and the (other) city are habitually perceived
by their fictional inhabitants to be distinct, they actually occupy the
same physical space. In the world of the novel, conscious crossing

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between the two cities constitutes a serious crime, known as “breach.”
It is forbidden—­a criminal act—­to notice the other city, even when
it is unmistakably and unavoidably present. In spatial terms, we can
read this as an extreme example of relational distance: in the fictional
world, while two streets (one in each city) may be so close to each
other that in fact they are not so much close as literally occupying the
same physical space, they will be separated in practice by an almost
unbridgeable relational distance. In the terms of the fictional world,
then, the cities occupy the same area, but through enforced habits of
lived spatial practice they are strictly separated. Denizens of each of
the two cities have been trained to become entirely adept at simply
not seeing the inhabitants, buildings, or streets of the other, and they
carry on their daily lives as if the copresent other (the city and its
people) is simply not there.
For residents of both cities, there are “total” areas, which are
unambiguously part of the city in which they live, “alter” areas, which
are unambiguously part of the other city and must be avoided and
ignored, and areas of “crosshatch.” These crosshatch areas are used by
both cities but commonly have two names, one in each city. “Copula
Hall” is a rare example of a place that not only exists in both cities but
has the same name in both; it is used as a gateway for border crossings.
Copula is a word that derives from the Latin noun referring to a link
that connects two different things. Considering that in terms of mea-
sured distance, the traveler making a border crossing through Copula
Hall literally goes nowhere, the journey from one city to the other is
a time-­consuming process. The traveler crossing the border ends up
where they started, but according to the logic of the doubled geogra-
phy of the novel’s copresent cities, they are somewhere else entirely.
The literary geography of Miéville’s two copresent cities, Besźel
and Ul Qoma, thus suggests a way in which to envision the process
by which a literary version of a multiple New York (many New Yorks
copresent in the same space) can build up for a reader in the fictional
space of a text like The Great World through the author’s intertextual
references and the reader’s own intertextual vocabulary, particu-
larly other “New York” novels. First, we could say there are “total”

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areas, existing only in that novel: the Soderberg apartment on Park

Avenue, for example—­“it’s very small, really. The plumbing is shock-
ing. The roof’s a mess.”8 Then there are “alter” areas, existing only
in other novels: the Park Avenue co-­op apartment that is home to
Sherman McCoy, for example, in Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vani-
ties, with its “twelve-­foot ceilings,” servants’ wings, and the “five-­foot
wide walnut staircase that swept up in a sumptuous curve to the floor

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above.”9 Finally, and most interestingly, there are “crosshatch” areas,
where it is possible for the geographies of different fictional worlds to
be copresent: Park Avenue, for example, where both the Soderberg
apartment and the McCoy apartment are located. This copresence of
“crosshatched” areas is enabled by several genres of connection, the
first and most obvious of which involves repeated references to par-
ticular real-­world places: the FDR parkway, the Bronx, Queens, and
Fifth Avenue.
While Miéville’s folded space involves two distinct but copresent
cities, the copresent cities of The Great World’s intertextual New York
are multiple. Additionally, while in the world of Miéville’s double city,
mixing the two spaces together—­knowingly seeing the other—­is a
crime; in the case of the multiple intertextual New York of The Great
World, it is a creative and positive contribution to the text event as a
whole. Moving from one dimension of this multiple factual-­fictional
New York space to another is both a large leap and no leap at all; it
is impossible for the New York of The Bonfire of the Vanities and the
New York of The Great World to be understood as the same place:
nevertheless, for a reader familiar with both, the two cities easily, in
fact almost inevitably, become part of each other.
The geographies of intertextuality work in this crosshatched
fashion with locations; but a comparable cross-­hatching occurs inter-
textually through coincidences of plot event and narrative style. As
each reading and thus each text event is inevitably unique, I am going
to work around the problem of universalizing any particular reading
by framing this chapter specifically by reference to my own experience
of intertextual reference in The Great World. I am in no way present-
ing this as a model or definitive reading; rather, I am offering it as the
result of a kind of participant observation. The idiosyncratic reading
of the novel that I will be discussing here reflects, I think, my inter-
est in questions of geography, location, and space and has also been
inflected by association with two genres of texts: first, memoirs and
representations of Petit’s 1974 wirewalk and, second, a small group
of other well-­known “New York novels.” It seems likely to me that
McCann intentionally created many of the echoes I hear bouncing off

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 The Intertextual City 107

these other texts, while other echoes I hear may be reverberating only
in the space of my own reading. Inevitably, there will be other echoes
that I do not hear. However, my reading of The Great World—­which
is to say, this version of my individual completion of the novel—­has
been contextualized, I think, most obviously in relation to an inter-
textual network involving Petit’s memoir To Reach the Clouds and four
novels set in New York City and its surroundings. Three of these come

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from a group of late twentieth-­century “New York” novels: Jay McIn-
erney’s 1984 Bright Lights, Big City, Tom Wolfe’s 1987 The Bonfire
of the Vanities, and Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 American Psycho. The
fourth is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, in which
most of the action takes place in and around New York and Long
Island.

P lot E vents
The Wirewalker
In addition to obvious overlaps in location and setting—­fictional,
factual, and intertextual—­ a second genre of connection enabling
the cross-­hatching of the parallel New Yorks that may coexist in an
intertextually inflected reading of The Great World involves parallel or
recurring plot events. These include specific one-­off historical events,
such as Petit’s twin towers wirewalk, and generic fictional events, such
as car crashes. Both kinds of recurring plot incident are able to func-
tion much as a sideways glimpse of a part of Besźel might for a resi-
dent of Ul Qoma; the existence of a wirewalking artist, for example,
in several of these dimensions or “possible cities” is one of the ways in
which different novels may seem to inhabit a crosshatched intertextual
space. Familiarity with similar plot events in other works of fiction
enables one of the many ways in which McCann’s readers “complete
the story.” Readers are influenced not only by the intertextual refer-
ences McCann has built into his narrative, intentionally or not, but
also by the intertextual connections they make themselves, again,
consciously or not. Particularly in the case of the generic events, it is
of course impossible to tell whether these plot parallels are deliber-
ate references, references made subconsciously, or simply accidental
similarities; however, whatever brings them into the text, they have
the potential to connect narratives in such a way as to create a multi-
dimensional literary space for some readers.
Philippe Petit’s walk, which is of course pivotal to the action and to
the narrative construction of The Great World, is also mentioned in at

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108 Literary Geographies

least one other “New York novel,” Bright Lights, Big City: “You linger
at the edge of Sheridan Square to watch an acrobat ride a unicycle
across a tightrope strung between the fences. A teenager in the crowd
turns to Vicky and says, ‘He did that between the towers of the World
Trade Center.’ ‘Can you imagine,’ a woman asks. ‘Sounds like my
job,’ you say. When the acrobat passes the hat you throw in a buck.”10
This passage was written years before McCann began to create his

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own New York novel, but now, for contemporary readers familiar with
both The Great World and Bright Lights, Big City, this passage brings
the two fictional worlds into some kind of coexistence. For some read-
ers, as a result, the New York of Bright Lights, Big City and the New
York of The Great World will form one complex location in literary
space. Of course, the two novels literally coexist on bookshelves, but
they also coexist contemporaneously in the imaginations of people
who have read both; as a result, a multidimensional literary space-­time
exists in a perpetual present. For readers today, the Sheridan Square
acrobat in Bright Lights, Big City may generate a moment of copula, a
place where literary space folds back on itself, which means that for a
moment, the New York of Bright Lights, Big City will become coter-
minous with the New York of The Great World. If we imagine, for a
moment, the literary space, which is made up of all possible fictional
and factual New Yorks of fiction, spread out flat and next to each
other, then this scene marks a place where the two-­dimensional space
has been crumpled into three, and two or more parts of the factual-­
fictional city have been folded together.
Traces of texts directly related to the wirewalk performance, such as
Petit’s memoir To Reach the Clouds, were also evident to me through-
out the novel: the two chapters narrated from the point of view of
the wirewalker, for example, seemed to me to be drawing on Petit’s
memoir, even though the wirewalker is never named. In fact, McCann
expresses his indebtedness to Petit in the author’s note that follows
the text in all 2009 editions: he directs the reader to Petit’s memoir
“for an intimate account” of the event, explaining that he has “taken
liberties with Petit’s walk, while trying to remain true to the texture
of the moment and its surroundings.”11 One of these liberties has to
do with the scenes immediately following the end of the wirewalk,
as Petit/the wirewalker is arrested and taken away. These scenes are
similar enough that it seems clear to me that McCann has read Petit’s
own account, but the atmosphere and the emotion are quite differ-
ent. In the novel, the fictionalized wirewalker appears relatively calm
as he insists that the wire be loosened and taken down. “He said: ‘You
must take down the wire.’ They thought he was joking. They had

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 The Intertextual City 109

no clue. It could tighten in the wind, snap, take off a man’s head.”12
In Petit’s memoir, the scene has more urgency and more specificity:
“It’s imperative I loosen the tension on the cable,” Petit explains des-
perately. “Right now, there’s three-­point-­four tons, but if the towers
sway, the tension will reach a terrible load and my cable will break.”
Petit narrates this moment as a moment of great danger: “I pause and
roar as dramatically as I can,” he recalls, “‘I’m warning you!’”13 In the

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novel, as the wirewalker is being guided toward the police car, he feels
“a gentle shove on his back and a pull on his arm.” In the memoir,
Petit describes being treated so roughly that he assumed “my escort
[was] trying to kill me.” With his “eyes wide open with fury, body
covered in goosebumps,” Petit remembers feeling that his life was in
more danger than it had been on the wire.
Another of the “liberties” McCann takes with Petit’s version of
events has to do with the “perfect sentence” that McCann’s fictional
Judge Soderberg imposes on the wirewalker: the fine of a dollar for
every story, which comes to a satisfyingly memorable $110. Readers
familiar with Petit’s memoir will know that in his version of what actu-
ally happened, a district attorney offers to drop the charges if Petit will
agree to make a free public performance for the children of New York
in a city park, to which Petit agrees. In the courtroom, Petit recalls,
after the judge has dealt with “three young ladies with brown skin”
and they have been “brutally taken away to their new prison,” the
judge turns to him to announce, “Sentence is given, all charges are
dropped,” and the “assembly applauds.”14 The “perfect” $110 fine, of
which Judge Soderberg is so proud, is actually a variation of the fine
imposed in a different court case involving a different daredevil assault
on the towers. About two and a half years after Petit’s wirewalk, the
mountain climber George Willig scaled the South Tower and was sub-
sequently fined by New York City Mayor Abraham Beane $1.10, one
cent for each story.
One way of thinking about these discrepancies is to say that we
can see the source of McCann’s detailed information while also
recognizing how he has reworked it; this view emphasizes the tem-
poral sequence of the different texts. Petit’s memoir was available to
McCann, but McCann’s novel was not available to Petit at the time he
was writing his memoir. Another way of thinking about the differences
has to do with the relationship between the two texts understood in
more spatial terms: currently, both texts are in print and available;
there is no telling in what order a reader familiar with both will have
read them. On the reception side of the event, then, the Petit text has

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110 Literary Geographies

the potential to revise a reader’s production of the McCann text and

vice versa.

Car Crashes
Turning to more generic plot events, the group of novels that pro-
vided the primary New York intertextual context for my reading of

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The Great World includes three fatal car crashes. My folded fictional
New York therefore includes the crash involving Lara and her hus-
band Blaine, which kills Corrigan and Jazzlyn; the crash involving
Sherman and Maria in Bonfire of the Vanities, which kills Henry Lamb;
and the crash involving Gatsby and Daisy in The Great Gatsby, which
kills Myrtle Wilson. The car crash in each case is a major plot pivot. In
The Great World, Lara and Blaine are heading home to upstate New
York when their car clips the back of Corrigan’s battered van. At the
time, Corrigan was driving back to the South Bronx with Jazzlyn,
who had been released by the police through a plea bargain under the
terms of which Tillie pleads guilty and Jazzlyn is allowed to go home
to take care of the children. According to Lara, the crash began with a
minor collision: “It was the gentlest tap.”15 There was “a small screech
of tires,” and Corrigan tried to steer the van out of trouble, but he
overcorrected, and the two cars collided again:

The van went into a wider spin and our car kept on going straight. We
passed them. The road opened like a split peach. I recall hearing the
first crunch behind us, another car hitting the van, then the clatter of
a grille that fell to the ground, and later on, when we went back over
it all in our minds, Blaine and I, we reheard the impact of the newspa-
per truck as it sent them into the guardrail, a big boxy truck with the
driver’s door open and the radio blaring. It hit with brutal force. There
never would have been a way out for them.16

It is obvious that the young woman is dead. The driver is probably

dead or dying. And the important question of who was driving the car
at the time of the accident comes up soon afterward, not because Lara
and Blaine are tracked down by the police but because Lara—­unable
to forget the accident—­abandons Blaine at their upstate rural cabin
and returns to the city, taking responsibility for the crash. She goes to
the Metropolitan Hospital and asks about “a man and a woman who
might have been brought in from a crash on Wednesday afternoon.”17
The receptionist assumes she is a relative. “You’re here for his things?”

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 The Intertextual City 111

she asks. Fifteen minutes later, Lara finds herself in possession of a box
of Corrigan’s possessions:

—­And the girl?

—­She was D.O.A., said the woman like it was a traffic signal.
She looked up at me and adjusted her glasses on her nose.
—­Anything else?
—­No thanks, I stammered.18

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Like the wirewalk, the car accident on the FDR parkway is a key
event in The Great World, which functions as a hub, a fold in space,
enabling the intertextual coming together of various trajectories in
the novel but also of various fictional New Yorks. With the fatal car
crash, The Great World is folded into a factual-­fictional New York
space that also includes the events of Bonfire of the Vanities and The
Great Gatsby. In Bonfire, the central character, Sherman McCoy, is
driving his Mercedes back into Manhattan from JFK airport, where
he has just met his mistress Maria off a flight from Europe. He is driv-
ing back in toward Manhattan along the Van Wyck Parkway when he
misses the off-­ramp and finds himself coming off the parkway into the
Bronx. He tells himself he can take a cross street back into Manhat-
tan. “How bad can it be?”19 It turns out to be very bad: “All at once
there was no more ramp, no more clean cordoned expressway. He
was at ground level. It was as if he had fallen into a junkyard.” He
drives through deserted streets, suddenly finds himself in a “vast open
terrain”—­blocks and blocks with no buildings standing at all—­and
then realizes that he’s made a complete circle. He sees a sign for the
George Washington Bridge, cuts across five lanes, and heads for a
ramp, only to find it blocked with trash cans. He gets out of the car,
picks up a tire that’s suddenly fallen from the expressway above onto
the road, and sees two young men on the ramp coming up behind
him. They ask him if he needs help. He panics. “Setting me up!” he
thinks and pushes the tire violently at one of the men. He runs back
toward the car—­with Maria now in the driver’s seat—­and crashes into
the other man, a “skinny boy,” sending him flying. McCoy then jumps
into the Mercedes. Maria starts the car, while the first man throws the
tire at the windshield; she accelerates, and the “rear end fishtailed . . .
thok! . . . the skinny boy was no longer standing . . . Maria fought the
steering wheel . . . A clear shot between the guardrail and the trash
cans . . . She floored it.”20
Just like Lara and Blaine after their crash with Corrigan’s van, Sher-
man and Maria shift the blame back and forth, while at the same time

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briefly considering reporting the accident to the police. They decide

not to. As the plot and Sherman’s life unravel in slow motion through
the novel, the question of who was driving, linked to the rupture in
the relationship between Maria and Sherman, becomes critical. Just
as in The Great World, the question of who was driving the car at the
time of the fatal crash becomes a crucial narrative pivot. The third car
crash involves the fatal collision of narrative lines that leads into the

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ending of The Great Gatsby when Tom’s mistress, Myrtle Wilson, see-
ing Gatsby’s distinctive yellow car but believing it was being driven
by Tom, runs out into the road into the path of the car and is killed
instantly. The intertextual and narrative imbrication of this crash with
the crash that kills Corrigan and Jazzlyn in The Great World is dis-
cussed in detail in the following chapter.

Nar r ative Sty l e

Shared locations and generic plot events thus provide two genres of
cross-­hatching effects that integrate the spaces of my group of New
York novels into my reading of The Great World; a third genre has to
do with parallels in narrative style and technique. Interestingly, all five
of the novels that provide the intertextual aspects of the “multiple
New Yorks” functioning in my reading are characterized by strongly
located narrative voices. Narrative point of view is obviously a key
stylistic device in McCann’s novel, with each chapter except the first
being focalized through the point of view of a single character. Nar-
rative position is also one of the key elements of the narrative style of
Bright Lights, Big City, which uses a sustained second-­person voice
that locates the reader in the position of the unnamed central char-
acter. This effect is evident right from the famous opening: “You are
not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of
the morning. But here you are.”21 The Bonfire of the Vanities also ori-
ents the reader to experience the plot events primarily from the point
of view of the central character, Sherman McCoy, in this case with
extended passages of third-­person limited narration. The reader is first
positioned with McCoy’s perspective in the novel’s second chapter,
as he is attempting to leave his apartment for a rendezvous with his
mistress. He tells his wife that is going to take the dog for a walk,
despite the rain. His wife suggests helpfully but maddeningly that she
walk the dog so that he can read their daughter a bedtime story. “He
stared at her. It wasn’t a trick! She was sincere! And yet zip zip zip zip
zip zip zip with a few swift strokes, a few little sentences, she had . . .
tied him in knots!”22

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 The Intertextual City 113

Almost the whole of American Psycho is presented from the point

of view of the main character, Pat Bateman, in a present-­tense stream-­
of-­consciousness style.23 The reliability of this narration has been the
topic of much debate. In part because it is narrated in the first person,
it is ultimately impossible to tell how much of his story is true, or
which events have actually happened in the world of the novel and
which only in the mind of the narrator. The question of the unreliable

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first-­person narrator is also famously central to the narrative struc-
ture of The Great Gatsby, with Nick Carraway participating in but also
commenting on the action throughout. Again, the reader has no way
to check the accuracy of Carraway’s memory or his storytelling, and
doubts inevitably surface. “I am one of the few honest people that
I have ever known,” claims Nick.24 But is he, in the end, any more
believable than Patrick Bateman? All the key information about Jay
Gatsby, along with the interpretation of his actions, motivations, and
feelings, are presented to the reader by Nick. Toward the end of the
novel, for example, in the penultimate chapter and at the climax of
the action, there is no direct description of events: Nick simply tells
the reader what “must have” happened. Gatsby is waiting desperately
for a phone call from Daisy: “I have an idea,” Nick says, “that Gatsby
himself didn’t believe it would come and perhaps he no longer cared.
If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world,
paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must
have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves.”25 It is
all too easy to forget that we are reading Nick’s version of what must
have happened, not Fitzgerald’s.
It might seem logical that because each one of these five New York
novels focalizes its action through specific participating characters, the
end effect would be to make the works more distinct, their New Yorks
less coterminous, and the various geographies less likely to merge
together in the reader’s mind. But for me, at least, the fact that they
all shared this emphasis on focalized narrative actually made it seem
more plausible that the five novels could be parallel stories running
like threads through the fabric of a single factual-­fictional version of
New York. In The Great World, the various first-­person narrative styles
are so sharply distinguished that while the New York characters in
the 1974 chapters are clearly inhabiting the same fictional location at
the same time and are all connected in one way or another through
the web of the plot, the dissonance in the chorus has the effect of
emphasizing the idea of New York as a city of multiple life stories
and multiple voices, all happening at the same time. As The Great
World itself takes in narrative voices from different time periods, with

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114 Literary Geographies

most of the chapters narrated in the present of 1974 and the last
chapter narrated 32 years later, the end result of this cross-­hatching
focalization for me is that it does not seem too strange a stretch of
the imagination to hear Pat Bateman’s voice—­or even, more faintly,
and echoing from another era, Nick Carraway’s—­participating in this
same dissonant chorus.

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10.1057/9781137413130 - Literary Geographies, Sheila Hones

 Chapter 8

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Literary Space

T he previous chapter described an intertextual New York in which a

combination of copresent New Yorks—­fictional and factual, imagined
and remembered—­came together in my participant-­observer reading
to produce a complicated unsettled city geography that could not be
unambiguously aligned with any single fictional location. The implica-
tion throughout was that there would be as many versions of such an
intertextual New York as there were readers, with each text event pro-
ducing a slightly different combination of New Yorks folded together.
The intricate geographies of uncountable intertextual New Yorks in
this sense would resemble the variable uncountable geographies of the
actual city as it was and is experienced by residents and visitors.
In its review of the literary geography of The Great World, this
book started by focusing on what, it seems to me, the text offers and
proposes: its depiction of setting and locations, the way in which it
writes New York City, and the characteristics of its narrative space.
Then, turning toward the contribution of the reader, it looked at
one example of the ways in which a reading informed by intertex-
tual associations produces a multiple New York constituted out of the
coming-­together of a range of fictional versions of the city. Having
now considered this idea of “an intertextual New York City,” this
chapter turns to the idea of textual space more generally and the ways
in which textual spaces constitute one of the dimensions in which
everyday sociospatial practice takes place.

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116 Literary Geographies

L i f e in a Wo r l d o f Books
Because The Great World is narrated by 12 very different narrative
characters, the uniqueness of their versions of the city are evident,
each of them inhabiting and spinning into being in their narrative a
mixed space made up of the imagined and the remembered as well as
the physically present. In several cases, it is clear that characters narrate
their own lives and experiences by reference to literature, poems, and

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books with which they are familiar and that have become woven into
their daily lives, using texts as ways of making sense of things and as
models for the narration of their own thoughts and experiences. This
adds another dimension to the novel’s depiction of geography. In the
event of The Great World, readers encounter descriptions and repre-
sentations of particular places, the narrative production of particular
kinds of space, and the enabling of a multiple intertextual New York.
They also encounter depictions of the ways in which people integrate
textual space into their daily lives, thereby suggesting how the con-
ventionally separated spaces of text and world, or fiction and fact,
actually amalgamate in lived experience.
Describing Corrigan’s apartment, in the first chapter of Book
One, Ciaran is struck by several details: not only the five locks on
the doorframe (“none of which worked”) and his prayer kneeler and
crucifix but also the evidence scattered around of his active reading
life. “Books lay on the floor, open, as if speaking to one another:
Thomas Merton, Rubem Alves, Dorothy Day.”1 Books, the voices
of others, are a part of Corrigan’s world, an important part of his
social space, and the books lying open on the floor suggest the ease
with which Corrigan moves between physical and textual space, as
well as his accessibility and his openness to otherness: the door that
can’t be locked suggests the same thing, as does the prayer kneeler,
as of course does the fact that he’s living in the Deegan at all. The
books on the floor represent not only shortcuts into other dimen-
sions, times, and spaces but also the conversation that is writing and
reading: in Ciaran’s narration, the books speak to each other; they
speak to authors; they speak to readers. This reverberates with what
McCann has said about his understanding of how fiction works and
why “a good novel,” as he puts it, can be “a doorstop to despair.”
One of the ways in which fiction can act as a doorstop, holding pos-
sibility open and resisting closure, is by maintaining a point of entry
into a different, alternative, more tangibly hopeful world, and in so
doing bringing the threshold of that other world right into the gritty,
otherwise inescapable present.

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 Literary Space 117

The lived geography of several of the narrating characters in The

Great World is in this sense presented in the novel as a geography of
here and there, now and then, in which the literary and the literal are
juxtaposed, each permanently hovering at the threshold of the other.
McCann’s characters live in New York City, literally, but they also live
in a world full of books; they move about from day to day not only
in a city and a social network but also in a subjective space of present

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and remembered texts. They are surrounded at all times by wormhole
connections opening up into literary space, the “unending library” of
the intertextual, a space of spaces. The precise configuration of liter-
ary space—­the organization of its accessibility—­will be different for
each of the narrating characters in The Great World, but many of them
narrate their stories in such a way that it becomes clear they are not
just living “in New York” but also living in the context of a space of
written and read, heard and remembered texts.
In Written Somewhere: The Social Space of Text, David Coughlan
argues that the space of any particular text has to be understood in
terms of its existence within an uncontained (in fact, uncontainable)
textual dimension, in which the intertextual is “not a means by which
we can link one textual space with another, or move from one to
another, but is itself a part of that space, is, in fact, the whole of that
space.”2 This uncontainable literary space is not susceptible to mea-
surement; as a whole, it is unmappable—­its distances and proximities,
its absences and gaps are contingent and unfixed. For Coughlan, this
means that the space of any particular text cannot be envisioned “as
contained within the space of the book as volume, arranged on the
shelf of the library, or shop, or study” but rather has to be seen as
a node within intertextual space, “a network of intersecting lines, a
nexus of repeated points without a beginning and without an end.”
In these terms, we can see how McCann’s characters narrate their
stories in the context of personal geographies made up not only of
physical and social space but also of textual space, which is to say, at
the same time, that in narrating their stories, they make sense out of
their experiences by reference to textual, as well as physical and social,
geographies.
It is important to note, as Coughlan does, that textual space is
unruly. In the same way that far-­distant Vietnam is an important space
within space for Claire, even though she has never been there, so a
textual space may be an important space within space for a character
even if he or she has never “been there”—­heard the poem, read the
novel, or seen the play. Raising the question of the point at which
“the reader actually comes into contact with, or enters, the space of

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the text,” Coughlan points out that paratextual elements (a book’s

cover, an advertisement, a review, an interview with the author) mean
that “we may be absent from the space of the book, removed from its
physical presence, and yet already on the threshold of the space of the
text, moving into its sphere of influence.” In this way, the “paratextual
presence” of a text “extends way beyond the confines of the covers
which hold the printed pages.”3

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Some openings into literary space are, of course, much more lit-
eral and physically immediate. Judge Soderberg, for example, actually
conversed with the poet Wallace Stevens when he was at Yale and now
has the whole of Stevens’s oeuvre “signed and arranged in a special
row” in his office.4 Claire remembers Solomon as a junior counsel in
Hartford walking with Stevens, and this memory of the two men in
a particular location prompts her toward the threshold of a poem:
“It did not give of bird or bush,” she quotes to herself, “Like nothing
else in Tennessee.”5 The educated Soderberg family clearly think and
communicate with each other in poetic reference: “I should have been
a pair of ragged claws,” Claire thinks to herself; Claire’s son Joshua,
enthusing about computers, tells her, “It’s like a Walt Whitman poem:
you can put in it everything you want.”6 More unexpectedly, Tillie—­
the streetwalker, Jazzlyn’s mother, who dies in prison—­also has a
significant poetic dimension to her life. Ciaran is taken aback by the
casual way she includes poetic quotation in their conversation on the
night she picks him up in Queens. She’s just been kicked out of a
client’s car, and he’s coming off work at an Irish bar: “‘Sugarplum,’
she shouted as she stumbled towards me with her handbag waving
above her head. She had lost her parasol. She put her arm in the crook
of mine. ‘Whosoever brought me here is going to have to take me
home.’ It was, I knew, a line from Rumi. I stood, stunned. ‘What’s the
big deal?’ she shrugged. She dragged me on. Her husband, she said,
had studied Persian poetry.”7
Several chapters later, when the narrative takes up Tillie’s story, it
transpires that it was not her husband who had studied Persian poetry
but rather a client: the small, brown man with whom she had spent a
week in the Sherry-­Netherland hotel. Following that encounter, Til-
lie remembers, “I began to read Rumi all the time. I liked it because
he had the details. I began saying shit to my tricks.”8 At Jazzlyn’s
funeral, in a scene narrated from Lara’s point of view, Tillie resorts
to her familiarity with the poetry of Rumi in a moment of despair:
“An odd thing occurred—­she began quoting some poet whose name
I didn’t catch, a line about open doors and a single beam of sunlight
that struck right to the center of the floor. Her Bronx accent threw

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 Literary Space 119

the poem around until it seemed to fall at her feet. She looked down
sadly at it, its failure.”9
Lara is another character who has a poetic soundtrack to her mem-
ories: in the days when she was almost permanently high on alcohol
and drugs, she recalls, her dealer and sometime lover Billy Lee used
to recite passages from Finnegan’s Wake to her: “The father of fornica-
tionists,” she remembers. “He had learned twenty pages by heart. It

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sounded like a sort of jazz. Later I could hear his voice ringing in my
ear.”10 But the extent to which Lara lives in a third space combining
the literary and the material becomes even more evident in the way in
which she articulates her experiences in her own chapter, and this is
where the novel’s performance of the intermingling of physical, social,
and textual space becomes particularly interesting.

The Great World and The Great Gatsby

Intertextual references to The Great Gatsby are woven throughout
Lara’s chapter “A Fear of Love,” generating a complex intertextual
fictional setting that in my reading at least repeatedly complicates the
New York setting of The Great World with embedded references to the
New York of Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby. That this folding of
the two novels is a feature of my reading of The Great World is partly a
result of the fact that I happen to be especially familiar with the earlier
novel, and its themes and stylistic rhythms are firmly planted in my
reading mind. So, of course, it must be noted that while echoes of The
Great Gatsby reverberate throughout the third chapter of Book One
for me, complicating my sense of setting and adding an extra dimen-
sion to the events, for readers less familiar with The Great Gatsby the
cross-­hatching of textual space in Lara’s chapter might well be entirely
invisible. Nevertheless, in my reading, various hints in Lara’s narrative
fold the space of this chapter with the fictional world of The Great
Gatsby from the beginning of her chapter.
For example, Lara wonders what Corrigan made of her, as he looked
down into their car from the cab of the van: “my fringed dress, my
curved beads, my hair cut flapper-­style.” Blaine is driving their antique
1927 Pontiac Landau, “gold with silver paneling,” with an eight-­track
cassette player “hidden under the dashboard” that allows them to play
twenties jazz as they drive.11 For a reader of The Great Gatsby, this is
surely enough already in the first few pages of Lara’s chapter: twenties
fashion, jazz music, a luxury car that is gold or yellow, and—­of course,
very soon—­a crucial car accident. Any reader familiar with The Great
Gatsby will probably sense some connection here to the climactic end

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120 Literary Geographies

to Nick’s story of Jay Gatsby, which is itself set in motion by the fatal
accident on the road between New York and West Egg as Gatsby and
Daisy drive home. “It was a yellow car,” a witness to the collision
tells the police. “Big yellow car. New.” The kind of car, perhaps, that
Ciaran imagines when he hears about the accident: “a gold vehicle
going about its everyday applause of itself.”12 At first, Nick—­who is
narrating the novel—­assumes Gatsby was driving, but when he asks

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him later how it happened, Gatsby explains, “Well, I tried to swing
the wheel—­” and then breaks off. Nick guesses the truth: “Was Daisy
driving?” “Yes,” Gatsby admits, “but of course I’ll say I was.” Daisy
had accelerated away from the accident: she “stepped on it,” Gatsby
explains (just as Maria had “floored it” as she and Sherman drove
away from the fatal incident in Bonfire of the Vanities). “I tried to
make her stop but she couldn’t so I pulled on the emergency brake.
Then she fell over into my lap and I drove on.”13
Immediately after the crash on the FDR, Blaine, too, had “stepped
on it”—­“Blaine looked over his shoulder and then floored it for an
instant until I shouted at him to stop please stop, please.”14 Blaine
does, eventually, stop driving. The couple get out of the car and look
back. It is obvious that the woman has been killed. Lara looks at
Blaine, and suddenly, to her, he looks “ridiculous and sad, his hair
flopping down over his eyes, all of him frozen to the past . . . Tell me
that didn’t happen, he said.” He walks around to the front of their
car to check on the damage, gives “a little groan of despair,” and Lara
understands clearly that “it was for the car . . . and what would hap-
pen to us shortly,” and so she tells him, “Come on, let’s go, quick,
get in, Blaine, quick, get a move on.”15 The parallels here are already
obvious, but they are strengthened later in the chapter, after Jazzlyn’s
funeral, when Corrigan sees Lara’s car, with its smashed headlight
and dented fender, and realizes what Lara’s connection with the crash
must be.

—­This is the car, isn’t it? . . .

—­It was an accident, I said.
—­This is the car, he repeated.
—­I didn’t mean to do it. We didn’t mean for it to happen.
—­We? he said.16

Corrigan pushes Lara to tell him what happened.

—­Were you driving it? The car?

—­Was I what?

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 Literary Space 121

—­Were you driving it or not?

—­I guess I was.
It was the only lie I’ve ever told that has made any sense to me.17

Lara and Gatsby are both prepared to lie in order to take respon-
sibility for the accidents in which they were involved as passengers.
Earlier, in the town near their upstate 1920s cottage, Blaine had

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ordered “a replacement headlight for a 1927 Pontiac” and “a front
fender.” Similarly, Gatsby instructs his chauffeur not to take his “gor-
geous car” out “under any circumstances,” which must have seemed
strange “because the front fender needed repair.”18 The way Lara
describes Blaine right after the accident also raises echoes of Nick’s
characterization of Jay Gatsby: he seems “frozen to the past” as he
implores her to tell him “that didn’t happen.” It is impossible for me
not to think of Nick’s Gatsby here, trying to erase the fact that Daisy
married Tom. “Just tell him the truth,” Gatsby tells her earnestly,
“that you never loved him” so that “it’s all wiped out forever.”19
According to Nick, Gatsby wants to marry Daisy in her hometown,
“just as if it were five years ago.” Nick tells the reader that he remem-
bers warning him that it couldn’t be that simple: “‘I wouldn’t ask too
much of her,’ I ventured. ‘You can’t repeat the past.’ ‘Can’t repeat
the past?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!’ He looked
around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his
house, just out of reach of his hand.”20
Lara herself wants to “arrest the clocks, stop everything for half
a second, give yourself a chance to do it over again, rewind the life,
uncrash the car.”21 As she drives back to the city, unable to forget
what happened, she yearns to go back to the life she had before the
car crash, just as Gatsby yearns to find his way back to the life he had
with Daisy before her marriage.
After achieving complete failure in their drug-­fuelled lives as artists
in Soho, Daisy and Blaine had deliberately set out to create a new way
of life for themselves, a 1920s lifestyle where they could live like “a
Scott and Zelda going clean.” They move to the log cabin upstate—­it
overlooks a lake, and there’s a dock—­to start over: “To return to the
moment of radical innocence. To paint. To stretch canvas. To find
the point of originality.”22 This desire to return to a simpler and more
innocent time surely also reverberates with the arc of Nick’s account
of Gatsby’s life and motivations: knowing that in order to achieve his
goal of reclaiming the magic of his prewar romance with Daisy he
will need a lot of money, Gatsby builds a criminal fortune bootleg-
ging and gambling and reinvents himself as a socially acceptable albeit

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mysterious party-­throwing mogul. Nick’s theory is that all of this—­

the move east to Long Island, the house, the money, the parties—­is
aimed at recovering a lost past: “He talked a lot about the past and I
gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself
perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused
and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain
starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that

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thing was.”23
As these piled-­up incidences of cross-­hatching intertextual refer-
ence start to suggest, the Gatsby connection with Lara’s chapter is
thus more interesting than a straightforward parallel between Gatsby
and Blaine. Lara and Blaine both, together and separately, share
Gatsby’s desire to erase the recent past and return to “a moment of
radical innocence.” Lara shares Gatsby’s inability to forget an early
romance—­in her case, with a boy from Dearborn. But Lara also con-
nects Blaine with Tom, remarking that “at times he still reminded
me of a polo player.”24 In Nick’s narrative, in an indication of his
wealth and privilege, Tom is the polo player.25 But even more interest-
ing is what happens when the cross-­hatching intertextual reference
is connected to the fact that the narrative style of Lara’s chapter is so
strongly focalized.
It seems to me that McCann’s use of the first-­person voice in Lara’s
chapter “A Fear of Love” is more than an author’s intertextual nod
to Fitzgerald’s use of an unreliable first-­person voice in narrating
the Gatsby story. In fact, it seems to me that the references to The
Great Gatsby in Lara’s chapter are particularly significant for a study
in the novel’s literary geography not primarily because they illustrate
McCann’s use of intertextual space in The Great World but more
importantly because they provide a fictional example of the way in
which people make sense of their experiences and narrate their lives by
reference to textual as well as social and physical space.
The fact that Lara’s chapter, narrated in her own voice, is shot
through with references to The Great Gatsby affords a highly interest-
ing complication, or set of folds, in the novel’s creation of a literary
space of intertextual reference because it raises the technical question
of the narrative level at which these references are being made. At first
reading, I took it for granted that it was McCann’s familiarity with
The Great Gatsby that was informing the chapter. After all, there are
quite a few Gatsby echoes in other chapters in the novel: one of the
wirewalker chapters, for example, describes how after a final period of
training he returns to New York to make his attempt on the towers.
He walks around the city, “seldom out of sight of the towers. It was

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the limit of what a man could do. Nobody else had even dreamed it.”
Coming back into the noise and hustle of the city, he had “felt like
an ancient immigrant: he had stepped on to new shores.”26 Already
primed for Gatsby connections by Lara’s chapter, this phrase, in the
context of the question of what a man can dream, struck me as an
echo of the closing page of Nick’s narrative, when he stands on the
beach near Gatsby’s house and becomes “aware of the old island here

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that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes,” a “transitory enchanted
moment,” which for Nick combined a dream with a place with the
human “capacity for wonder.”27 Perhaps McCann is suggesting that
the fresh new space between the towers provided the wirewalker with
something similar.
Going through Lara’s chapter again, however, I began to realize
that in my reading of that section, the interesting point to the Gatsby
connections was that it was (the fictional) Lara who was threading
them through the narrative and that the author, McCann, seemed
to me to be using intertextual Gatsby references in her first-­person
account to provide a picture of how the narrating character was expe-
riencing the events depicted in her chapter—­how she was narrating
her life, how she talked to herself and told her own story. In terms of
a literary geography of New York, and the intertextual literary space
created in The Great World in the collaboration of author and readers,
this means that not only is the reader exposed to multiple simultane-
ous New Yorks as this text connects in their mind with other texts, but
also that a fictional character inside the world of the text is experienc-
ing her own surroundings and the events of her life in a mixed space
made up of her immediate 1970s surroundings and the 1920s New
York–­Long Island world of The Great Gatsby.
This suggests that inside the world of the novel, Lara is living in
a third space made up of what is (for her) reality and what we must
assume is her familiarity, in that world, with Fitzgerald’s novel. This
distinction (between McCann’s use of Fitzgerald’s novel and Lara’s
habit of making sense of her life by reference to The Great Gatsby)
clarifies the point that there are multiple levels of intertextual ref-
erence going on in The Great World, some of them existing inside
the world of the novel and others happening in the space-­time pro-
duced by intersections linking McCann with past, present, and future
readers.
This recognition of the different kinds of intertextual reference and
the different literary spaces they generate allows a distinction to be
made between three kinds of intertextual references: the first is made
directly between author and reader, for example, in McCann’s use of

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124 Literary Geographies

quotations from “Locksley Hall” in the book title—­which is taken

from a couplet that comes toward the conclusion of the poem, “For-
ward, forward let us range / Let the great world spin for ever down
the ringing grooves of change”—­and in chapter headings. The second
kind of intertextual reference in The Great World is made explicitly
by or on behalf of characters inside the fictional world, depending
on whether the narrative is first person or third person limited—­for

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example, Claire’s description of how her son Joshua described his
computer programming: “It’s like a Walt Whitman poem: you can put
in it everything you want.”28 The third kind of reference, exemplified
by Lara’s framing of her own story by reference to phrases, themes,
and events from The Great Gatsby, is embedded in first-­person narra-
tives, and this is the type of intertextual reference that suggests how
textual space becomes folded into daily (nontextual) experience. It is
because Lara is to some extent consciously performing her life as a
variation on The Great Gatsby that she narrates the moments after the
car crash in a way so reminiscent of the earlier novel: Blaine looked
“ridiculous and sad, his hair flopping down over his eyes, all of him
frozen to the past . . . Tell me that didn’t happen, he said.” Lara wants
to “arrest the clocks, stop everything for half a second, give yourself
a chance to do it over again, rewind the life, uncrash the car.” The
Gatsby echoes are so strong in Lara’s narrative that even very oblique
references can take on an air of intertextual significance: in the first
few seconds after the accident, for example, as Jazzlyn must have been
dying, Lara feels that the road “opened like a split peach.” The idea
that this may be a displaced image describing what she believes must
have happened to Jazzlyn is suggested by the echo of the way in which
Nick interrupts Gatsby’s account of his own car crash: “‘It must have
killed her instantly.’ ‘It ripped her open.’”29
The argument I want to make about Lara’s narrative and the way
in which it reveals the extent to which she narrates her life by refer-
ence to themes and phrases from The Great Gatsby is that it provides
a useful fictional depiction of the extent to which people are able to
exercise agency in adding a textual dimension to the mixed physical,
social, and allusive space in which they live. Lara seems to have had no
control over the car crash; her narrative gives no indication that she
could have prevented it. In contrast, her narration reveals the extent
to which she has control over the ways in which she frames the event,
how she performs it in social space, which for her includes an impor-
tant textual dimension. Lara, it seems, quite consciously chooses to
locate herself in a simultaneously social and textual space that mixes

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 Literary Space 125

the 1970s New York of her literal surroundings with a version of

1920s New York that she has extrapolated from her reading.
In this sense, as someone who lives in a simultaneously literary and
literal space, Lara represents the kind of reader for whom McCann’s
novel might indeed work as a “doorstop to despair.” As noted in the
introduction, McCann began work on his novel in post-­9/11 New
York, wondering “how was it possible to create an alternative mean-

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ing,” and The Great World as a whole can in this sense be read as his
intervention into the configuration of the mixed material and textual,
grieving and anxious New York in which he lived.30 The novel embod-
ies his own struggle with meaning as well as his endeavor to provide
access for his readers into a textual world that might enable new and
more hopeful ways of living day to day, a textual world in which as
“two little girls emerge from a Bronx housing complex and get res-
cued by strangers . . . the towers get built back up.”31 But of course
the intervention of The Great World is not New York specific; while
it is a response to a particular place at a particular time, it is also a
contribution to a broadly literary space of textual interaction in which
time is collapsed and distance means nothing. The extent to which
McCann located his novel in this space as consciously as in the histori-
cal New York of Petit’s actual walk, and the contemporary New York
in which he lived, is marked by his extensive use of literary reference.
This use of intertextual reference thus provides readers with a narra-
tive model for a hopeful way of living not specific to a particular time
and place but located in a literary space-­time potentially accessible
from almost anywhere, at any time.

Liter ary S pac e-­T ime

The literary space-­time of The Great World is so full of allusion, in fact,
that one critic even called the novel a “a North American pastiche”
because of its references to “Gatsby, Leonard Cohen, Denis Johnson,
Ondaatje, Fort Apache—­The Bronx, The Wire,” and its inclusion of “a
scene identical to a movie trailer where James Caan struggles to teach
Hugh Grant how to say ‘fuhgeddaboudit.’”32 According to John
Cusatis’s Understanding Colum McCann, the novel also includes ref-
erences to Chinua Achebe, John Berger, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Jack
Kerouac, José Martí, Friedrich Nietzsche, William Shakespeare, and
Walt Whitman—­“to name only a few.”33 One of the most striking
uses of intertextual reference in the novel is the title itself, a quota-
tion from British poet Alfred Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall,” a poem
written in 1835, first published in 1842, and reanimated in literary

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126 Literary Geographies

space in 2009 with the publication of McCann’s doorstop. Relocated

in the paratextual apparatus of McCann’s novel, the title is obscure
enough that it must prompt quite a few readers to look up the refer-
ence and think about the intertextual link. Stylistically, even, Tenny-
son’s original connects to McCann’s novel, as the poem is a dramatic
monologue narrated in the first person, recounting the experience
of a soldier who comes across his childhood home while traveling

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with his military unit. He leaves his comrades briefly to visit a setting
(Locksley Hall), which prompts intense memories, regrets, and anger;
eventually, he moves on from bitterness to hope for a positive future
and finally leaves Locksley Hall again to return to his unit and carry
on with his life. Several of the otherwise cryptic chapter headings in
The Great World are also quotations from the poem, and a curious
reader, even if unfamiliar with the Tennyson poem, might track these
down and reflect on the ways in which the two texts inform each other
as strands in a network in literary space. McCann has explained in an
interview how his own openness to a world of books was part of his
writing practice:

I had some difficulties finding the title, but then I came across the
Tennyson quote: “Let the great world spin forever down the ringing
grooves of change . . .” And, as luck would have it, Tennyson had
been influenced by a series of sixth century pre-­Islamic poems, the
Mu’allaqat, which asks the question: “Is there any hope that this deso-
lation can bring me solace?” And when I found that line, my heart
skipped a beat or three, because it was exactly what I wanted. But I
can’t claim any intelligence on any of this. It arrived for me. I feel like
so much of the novel just fell in place, that all I was doing was opening
up the windows and letting it come in.34

And speaking of Philippe Petit and his wirewalk, McCann explains,

“I love what he did. I think he’s an artist. I spun out from his walk,
in the same way that the title spins out from Tennyson, which in turn
spins out from a series of sixth-­century Arabic poems. Everything has
a precedent.”35 This kind of intertextual reference—­texts spinning out
of texts—­is used by McCann throughout The Great World in such a
way as to juxtapose otherwise unconnected times and places and to
highlight the ways in which the world of the imagination, of reading
and writing, intersects or intrudes into the material world of daily life.
The other prominent set of intertextual poetic references in the
fictional space of The Great World link both the novel and the way
that characters in the fictional world of the novel live in a mixed

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 Literary Space 127

literary-social-material space to the poems of Rumi. Not only are quo-

tations from Rumi important points of reference for Tillie, holding
her life story together, but she also depends on the literal accessibility
of the text. She first encounters the poems when a client asks her to
read to him “Persian poems”: “I left with eight hundred dollars and
a copy of Rumi. I never read nothing like that before,” Tillie recalls.
“Made me want to have a fig tree.”36 “He gave me that Rumi book

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when I left,” Tillie recalls. “I shoved it in my handbag, didn’t think
much of it at first, but it crept up on me, like a street lamp.”37 Later,
isolated in prison, she is cut off from her poetry as well as her grand-
children: “They don’t got no books I like. I asked them for Rumi and
they said ‘What the hell is that?’”38 She is reunited with the poetry
after Lara’s first visit. “She slips a couple of books across the table
and I’m like, Wow, Rumi, how the fuck did she know?” As she leaves
the visiting area, “still wondering how she knew about Rumi,” Tillie
suddenly realizes what the connection must be, who knew about her
fondness for Rumi: it has to be Ciaran, from the night she picked him
up in Queens, quoting at him, “Whosoever brought me here is going
to have to take me home.”39 In this way, the exchange of literary
references and the handing along of an actual text create a circula-
tion among the characters in The Great World, thereby generating and
sustaining networks in social space.
The “spinning out” of texts into social and material space is high-
lighted one last time in the novel in the final chapter, as the narrative
circles back to the thread of reference running through the narrative
to Rumi and to “Locksley Hall” in the title for Jaslyn’s chapter. Ear-
lier, chapter headings for the two sections narrated from the point of
view of the wirewalker embedded in the body of the novel have both
been taken almost exactly from “Locksley Hall.” In the original, the
lines begin, “Forward, forward let us range, / Let the great world
spin forever down the ringing grooves of change,” becoming, in the
two chapter headings, “Let the Great World Spin Down Forever” and
“The Ringing Grooves of Change.” The chapter headings even carry
a distant echo of Rumi: “Flow down and down in always / widening
rings of being.” The final reference is in the title for Jaslyn’s chapter,
“Roaring Seaward, and I Go,” the phrase here coming from the final
lines of “Locksley Hall”:

Comes a vapour from the margin, blackening over heath and holt,
Cramming all the blast before it, in its breast a thunderbolt.
Let it fall on Locksley Hall, with rain or hail, or fire or snow
For the mighty wind arises, roaring seaward, and I go.40

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128 Literary Geographies

Whatever comes, whatever happens, the world spins, and life goes
on. This is essentially what Jaslyn asserted at the start of her chapter,
as she looked at the photograph of the wirewalker: “The plane passes,
the tightrope walker gets to the end of the wire. Things don’t fall
apart.” Here the reference is surely to “The Second Coming,” the
poem written by W. B. Yeats in the aftermath of the First World War.
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed

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upon the world”—­this is a dark vision of the world, full of foreboding,
a view of human history that must have seemed all too appropriate to
many in the days after 9/11. It also reaches toward Chinua Achebe’s
Things Fall Apart, as McCann made clear in a speech he made in
2008 at the PEN tribute to Achebe, “Things Come Together, Things
Fall Apart”: “The best literature is connected,” McCann insisted. “We
are word-­linked. What gives off the deepest sparks is the democracy of
story-­telling.”41 In “Written Somewhere: The Social Space of Text,”
David Coughlan argues that “once removed from the confines of the
purely physical and mental planes, literary space becomes an extension
of our social spatiality and a new site for social transformation.”42 And
the final chapter of the novel pushes toward a heartening social trans-
formation as Jaslyn voices a counterpoint for New York: things don’t
fall apart, the world keeps spinning. In the face of danger, disaster and
tragedy, loss and death, the life of the spinning world holds together
and moves forward. Leaving aside the question of the tension between
despair and hope in the actual world of the novel’s creators and read-
ers, within the fictional world of the novel, this textually endorsed
vision seems to me to be convincing: here, despite everything, things
don’t fall apart.

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 Chapter 9

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Geographies of Creation
and Promotion

A fter six chapters of close reading and textual analysis concentrating

on the intratextual and the intertextual, here in the next two chapters,
the discussion turns to a consideration of two extratextual aspects of
the literary geography text event: in this chapter, production and pro-
motion and, in the following chapter, reception. However, while this
chapter moves beyond text-­centered analysis to consider geographies
of the creation and promotion of The Great World, the expansion of
focus is by no means intended to imply that knowledge of the condi-
tions of production is indispensable (or even necessarily useful) for the
creation of a valid reading of the text. The goal here is not to deter-
mine what the author may or may not have intended or to suggest
that knowledge of the author’s historical geography, biography, or
location is a necessary prerequisite for serious reading and interpreta-
tion. Rather, because the point of the chapter is to acknowledge that
geographies of production and promotion are significant components
of literary geography, the emphasis here continues to be on McCann’s
novel (and McCann’s professional persona) as a model through which
to explore literary geography, not on literary geography as a method
of literary interpretation.
The turn in this chapter toward extratextual geographies of liter-
ary production, as suggested previously, not only gestures toward the
traditional literary geographical interest in locations of creation and
of influence but also draws upon new initiatives currently under way
in studies of the geographies of writing processes, as exemplified by
Angharad Saunders’s recent article “The Spatial Event of Writing.”1
Focusing on “the process and practice of literary creation,” Saunders

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130 Literary Geographies

presents a case study of “what happens prior to and after” the act of
writing—­what inspires it, influences it, and develops it. Focusing on
John Galsworthy’s production of the novel Fraternity, Saunders looks
in detail at how Galsworthy’s “socio-­spatial relationships demonstrate
how writing is more than a situated undertaking and is, instead, a
practice that occurs over the times and spaces of lived experience.”2
This distinction between writing as “situated” and as “a practice that

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occurs over . . . times and spaces” is crucial and represents a useful
development in literary geographies of production, shifting attention
away from a fixed setting for creation and toward the role of various
kinds of space and distance, histories and networks.

Ex tr atex tual G eo gr aphi es

As Saunders’s work on the sociospatialities of literary creation indi-
cates, extratextual geographies are just as important an aspect of
contemporary literary geography as intratextual and intertextual
geographies. Joanne Sharp, in her work on Salman Rushdie, for exam-
ple, usefully points to the distinction between intra-­and extratextual
geographies in her analysis of the ways in which “Rushdie’s global
geo-­graphing and the geo-­graphing of Rushdie have come into con-
flict.”3 This distinction clarifies the point that in a literary geography
of Rushdie’s work, we can look not only at how he writes the world
in his fiction but also at how his writing shapes the reading world,
the way in which the production and reception of his work has itself
configured global space in particular ways. So while “Rushdie’s work
offers the geographer”—­and no doubt many readers and critics—­“a
world where the fluidities of hybridity and mobile spatial practices
can play out,” Sharp argues that it is still necessary to analyze “the
contexts of writing and reception” in order “to understand the novel’s
relationship with the world that it seeks to narrate.”4 There is a geog-
raphy presented in the text, and another geography produced by the
event of the novel—­the interaction of author, reader, and text. Sharp
therefore argues for the need to approach literary texts not only as
“intricate and complex” constructions but also as entities with “very
material existences and detectable roles within society.”5
The Great World has a “material existence” in the world today
because a variety of interests and processes, all with their own geo-
graphical contexts, continue to converge in the never-­ending process
of producing the novel (creatively and materially). This kind of con-
vergence has been explored in interdisciplinary studies of geography,
book history, and the science history—­as, for example, in the analysis

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 Geographies of Creation and Promotion 131

by Charles Withers and Innes Keighren of author-­editor relations in

the production of narratives of travel and exploration. The geographer
Robert Mayhew, meanwhile, uses the term material hermeneutics to
refer to an approach that “takes seriously [the] printed format as a
bearer of expressive meaning.”6 The convergences that produce the
novel include not only the inspiration for and creation of the work
but also the presentation and promotion of the work and of its author.

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In her earlier (2010) review article for Progress in Human Geogra-
phy, Saunders identifies the key themes in textual geography today
as “knowledge, practice, and poetics,” including in her definition of
literary practice not only “genre, style and form” but also “the mate-
rial conditions of writing: the production, circulation and reception of
the written word.”7
The sensibility embodied in research practices associated with
actor-­network theory (introduced earlier in Chapter 6) has some use-
ful implications in regard to this way of thinking of the public persona
of the author. An actor-­network orientation emphasizes, for example,
that agency is always distributed: “It is a relational effect that is the
outcome of the assemblage of all sorts of social and material bits and
pieces. It is these actor networks that get things done, not subjects
or objects in isolation. Actors are thus networks and vice versa, hence
the significance of the always hyphenated ‘actor-­network theory.’”8 It
also emphasizes the role of nonhuman actors, which suggests that in
the literary geography of the novel, geographers might benefit from
paying attention to the contributions to the actor-­network of “immu-
table mobiles,” such as manuscripts and printed texts “through which
knowledge travels.” Also significant in the context of the author and
the text event (particularly in the case of a globally recognized figure
such as McCann) is the tendency for actor-­network theory to “at once
‘localise the global’ and ‘redistribute the local,’” which has been taken
up by geographers interested in the question of action at a distance.9
While it may seem heretical to introduce into the discussion of literary
creativity the idea that actor cannot be separated from network—­​that
networks are actors and actors networks—­this approach does not in
practice diminish Colum McCann as a creative force. It merely rec-
ognizes the way in which the literary world works in the creation of
widely read fiction and in the concomitant creation of widely recog-
nizable authors. This returns to the point made in Chapter 2 about the
instability not just of “the author” but also of “the text.” The success
of The Great World depends of course in part on its intrinsic literary
value, but that value in turn depends on the novel being read in the
first place, being reviewed and noticed, and its being found to fulfill

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normative expectations not just in terms of its formal qualities but

also (paradoxically) in terms of innovation. To repeat the point made
in Chapter 2, the status of a valued text such as The Great World is in
practice sustained by it being located and relocated within powerful
social and academic networks. As the literary scholar Jane Tompkins
has argued, texts themselves are “not durable at all,” at least “in any
describable, documentable sense.” The reputation, the popularity, of

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any novel is as a result “a contextual matter.”10

G eo gr aphies o f Wr iti ng
It is clear that for McCann, writing is a spatial practice and a far from
sedentary one. He often talks in interviews of the kind of research he
undertook as he was working on The Great World, which included not
just archival and textual research (reading oral histories, rap sheets,
journals, and books; watching documentaries; looking at films and
photographs) but also active research in the New York in which he
lives. “I went out with cops in the Bronx,” McCann says, “I [hung]
out a lot in the courthouses.”11 The geography of his inspiration and
source material, like the geography of the novel itself, is both localized
(primarily in New York City) and networked. In an email conversa-
tion with McCann, Aleksandar Hemon comments that the novel is
“clearly a book about the city of New York, a celebration of it,” to
which McCann responds, “Oh yeah, I hope so.” In a follow-­up to
this, Hemon asks, “Could your book have been written for and/or in
any other city?” McCann replies, “But New York is where it felt right.
and I know New York pretty well now.” He is responding primarily,
it seems, to the “for” in Hemon’s question, not to the “in”—­but
then he goes on to admit that “there’s something about New York
and what an international city it is. I love it here.”12 So it seems that
for McCann, New York is enticing and exciting in both a local and a
global sense.
Similarly, when McCann talks of the inspirations that started the
novel for him, he emphasizes the particularity of New York places and
events: “I wanted the under-­and over-­current of the towers, which
come down, which fall.” But at the same time, he is aware of the way
in which New York events (the wirewalk, 9/11) occur not just in
Manhattan but also around the world, and the sociospatial relation-
ships and interactions at work in McCann’s writing processes are as
diverse and widespread as are the trajectories that make up what we
call in shorthand “9/11.” He connects the theme of healing in his
narrative not just to New Yorkers or even to Americans but also to all

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those around the world affected by those events. He has spoken, for
example, of his reaction to a 9/11 story from Ireland in a way that
seems to me to illuminate his sense of purpose in writing The Great
World:

I recently heard a story of a man in Ireland cutting his grass on 9/11

when the phone rang and he went inside to answer, and he just crum-

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pled to his knees, because his daughter was gone, and he left the grass
uncut, one half of it long, one half of it short. But the fact of the matter
is that the grass will find its own level. It will grow back, it will level out.
And eventually I’m sure that the man went back out to cut the grass,
maybe wept for his daughter but also got that new-­mown smell.13

The long-­distance range of the inspirations for McCann’s writing

practice reminds us that, as Saunders has pointed out, while it is com-
mon to think of fiction as text produced in “a setting,” a rather fixed
and stable place, an author producing fiction will in practice usually be
drawing on a complex network of extended sociospatial relationships.
At the same time, the author of fiction will also have to extend them-
selves imaginatively in the process of inhabiting and then articulating
other bodies, voices, places, and times. In other words, the writer has
to work with locations and distances, both literal and imagined, in
creative and complicated ways.
When McCann talks of the places in which he writes, for example,
he makes it clear that these are plural. He needs a writing place for
his novels, but in each case somewhere slightly different: he creates
distinct surroundings within which to write distinct novels. Further-
more, his places for writing are not only various, but his relationships
with them and his feelings about them also clearly change over time:
“I also need a room—­a specific room—­for each novel. My most recent
novel Let the Great World Spin was written at home in my New York
apartment. The room is small and dark and wonderful, with a window
looking out to a brick wall, and it’s a perfect place to write. But it has
become musty with that novel. So I have to go out and try to find a
new place to write.”14
A recent interview with McCann suggested that his latest place to
write is in fact to be found within the same room, one small corner of
it, with the key elements to the space of his actual writing still being
that it is small, dark, enclosed: a photograph accompanying the inter-
view shows him jammed into a cramped space that was once a closet,
sitting on the floor, laptop on his knees.

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In Colum McCann’s apartment, on the ninth floor of an elegant build-

ing just off Central Park, there’s a room where he writes that looks as
if it were airlifted in from the woods. It’s all rough-­hewed floorboards
and shelves made of unvarnished pine and two-­by-­fours and a long,
thick cedar slab for a desk. At one end of that desk there’s a space that
used to be a closet, but at McCann’s request, the friend who built the
office took off the door and put a platform in there, and this is where
McCann writes, “in the cupboard,” as he put it. “It concentrates my

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vision. No windows, two very tight walls.” He sits on a couple of cush-
ions with his computer on his lap.15

From what McCann has said about his process of writing, review-
ing, and revising his work, it is clear that the strategic manipulation
of setting, location, and distance is important for him, as is the con-
trol of personal and public availability through such strategies as the
establishment of household rules and the creation of a stable authorial
persona, which can function as the public version of the writer. Just
as he talks of creating distance in his family home (“My kids are not
allowed to knock on my door or anything because I’m working”),
while demonstrating in appearances and interviews that he has created
a public version of himself, he also talks in interviews of the need to
create distance between himself and his manuscript.16 The process of
constructing the novel seems to involve not just the establishment of
a literal space in which to write but also the very literal manipulation
of text, and McCann uses an architectural image of novel construc-
tion to describe the writing process: “You try to feel . . . things out
as you’re going, and invent this architecture, this house. But isn’t it
always scary? Because you think it will collapse like a house of cards,”
he says. And this sense of construction is more than an image: “The
way I write,” McCann says, is a process of “push together, pull apart,
tape together, pull apart, break, reconnect.” Working with a spatial,
architectural image in mind, McCann provides an autobiographical
account of the way he literally manipulates the page space of his man-
uscript.17 Another of McCann’s writing strategies, he has explained, is
to print out “a chapter or two in large font,” staple it together “like
a book,” and take it “to Central Park. He finds a quiet bench and
pretends he’s reading a book by someone else.” Yet another strat-
egy manipulates distance in a different way: “Other times, when he’s
re-­reading a bit of dialogue or trying to tweak a character’s voice,
he’ll reduce the computer font to eight-­point Times New Roman. ‘It
forces me to peer at the words and examine why they’re there.’ . . .

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Changing the way the words look physically gives him more critical
distance, he says.”18

G e o g r a phies o f the “Liter ary World”

In one of a series of conversations McCann has had with the Bosnian-­
American writer Aleksandar Hemon, he refers to “our world,” and

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Hemon takes him up on the phrase: “What do you mean our world?
You mean literary world? What is that? I don’t know what that is.”19
The idea of the “literary world” is complex: it might refer here in
some senses quite specifically to the literary milieu in which McCann
moves in New York. It might refer more widely and abstractly to the
global links and networks that connect writers, publishers, reviewers,
and critics. McCann certainly seems to inhabit both these “worlds,”
although later in the conversation, his use of the “we” voice certainly
seems to imply a specifically American literary world.20 In fact, the
Believer Magazine conversation in which McCann and Hemon discuss
the literary world is a good example of the mixed local and global
nature of this literary space. The two authors have had quite a few pub-
lic conversations, dating back to the early exchanges printed in 2003
in the UK newspaper The Guardian and including later exchanges
now available in video form, such as the conversation held at the PEN
event on “New European Fiction” in 2010: “Continuing their recent
conversation in the pages of The Believer, Best European Fiction series
editor Aleksandar Hemon will speak with Colum McCann, who will
be writing the preface for next years anthology, about the current state
of fiction in Europe and their own sense as Europeans about what
European fiction now has to offer American and world readers.”21
The fact that the Believer Magazine conversation is clearly one
of a series of such exchanges makes the implied (textual) geography
of the opening to the conversation rather curious. Despite the fact
that Believer introduces the exchange as “an email continuation of a
series of conversations,” McCann opens with a question that seems
to imply that the two authors are present together and talking face-­
to-­face: “What are we doing here? Why aren’t we in a pub?” he asks,
to which Hemon replies, “Because you live in the provinces, far away
from everything.” According to the introduction, Hemon lives in
Chicago and McCann lives in New York City, so the geography of this
exchange is somewhat inexplicable, or at least ironic, from the very
beginning. McCann goes on to answer his own question (“What are
we doing here?”) by acknowledging that the point is for the two of
them to have a conversation (“We’re here . . . to talk.”). Unless I have

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misread the Believer Magazine introduction to this exchange, while

the tone here suggests a local face-­to-­face conversation, in fact it’s a
staged email exchange between two globally renowned authors who
are talking—­or in fact, writing—­as much for an audience as for each
other. The disorienting geography of the conversation comes back
into view when the conversation breaks off six single-­spaced pages
later, McCann apparently having decided that they’ve been talking

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dry long enough: “Pub now,” he says (or writes), “Come on. Let’s
go!” Presumably, this is the point at which McCann and Hemon exit
the cyberstage, taking themselves off for a hypothetical drink.
Although, as mentioned previously, McCann states in interviews
that he enjoys the promotional duties he is obliged to undertake as
the author of a bestselling novel, he has also expressed some concern
about this aspect of the writer’s life—­the pressure to appear in the
public eye, to answer questions, to explain himself. McCann opens his
2010 conversation with Aleksandar Hemon with a comment on this
pressure, admitting that he is “slightly off-­put by our world becom-
ing increasingly rarefied, like the world of art, where we must justify
ourselves with our meaning.” He worries that a writer “can disease
himself or herself with his or her own position, thinking about it
too much . . . Imagine constantly explaining ourselves. Like a foot-
ball commentary or something.”22 Perhaps it is possible to speculate
that the creation of a relatively stable persona for performance pur-
poses is a strategy McCann has developed in order to deal with this
problem. Perhaps it is not so much a question of self-­promotion as
self-­protection.

“Co lum Mc C ann”

Almost all of the information I have been using so far in this chap-
ter about the geographies of inspiration, creation, and production for
McCann’s The Great World is easily and publicly available. Successful
modern authors are generally expected by their publishers to provide
interviews, make public appearances, give lectures, and in general, sus-
tain a particular public persona. This means that everything that is
publicly known about Colum McCann (in terms of his working prac-
tices and the production of his texts) has to be understood as a text
event in itself. For this reason, although the author of The Great World
is of course central to this chapter on production and promotion, my
subject here is not so much the historical living author himself as an
author figure emerging out of a set of texts, videos, and performances,
all of which are part of the process of promotion.

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With its emphasis on the author “Colum McCann” and what

that author figure reveals about the settings and processes of cre-
ation, this chapter reaches back, to a certain extent, toward some of
the more longstanding and traditional concerns of literary geogra-
phy. However, while the focus in this chapter inevitably has much
to do with the author of The Great World, the difference here is that
the concept of “the author”—­as indicated previously—­delineates a

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more complex figure than has generally been the case in conventional
author-­oriented literary geography. In Chapter 2, the brief discussion
of “the author” laid out the basic idea that in the text as event, “the
author” is anything but a stable entity, and this chapter pushes this
instability yet further by interrogating even more closely the problem
of the publicly available “Colum McCann.” So in this chapter, in writ-
ing about McCann I am not primarily referring to the man who lives
on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, who teaches at Hunter College
and goes to baseball games with his children. Neither am I talking in
this chapter primarily about the author figure immanent in the texts of
Colum McCann’s fiction—­a figure present in a slightly different form
in each one. What I am talking about here is the professional writer,
the person who presents himself in interviews, the person who is con-
structed and promoted in press releases and book blurbs, the person
who is summarized and packaged in biographies and press releases.
This is the publicly accessible Colum McCann, the McCann that func-
tions most visibly in the ongoing text event of The Great World.
This Colum McCann is the figure represented by the Lavin Agency
as a speaker. As of May 10, 2014, the Lavin Agency website explains
that “a key aspect of working at The Lavin Agency is being able to
say that we have a speaker who is better than these other speakers, for
these specific reasons.” Obviously, this is a business (like book pub-
lishing), and authors do not give talks only to generate publicity for
their work, increase sale figures, and improve their standing on best-
seller lists. While the fee that the Lavin Agency charges for a McCann
talk is not stated, the figure mentioned in passing in the FAQ section
of the website for a keynote address by a Lavin author is $10,000.
The speech topic available for McCann through the Lavin Agency (his
exclusive agent) is “An Evening with Colum McCann.” It promotes
him as a top-­ranked author, a skilled speaker, and a “nice guy”:

When Colum McCann released Let the Great World Spin in 2009, it
entered the pantheon of Great American Novels almost instantly. By
the end of the year, it won the National Book Award and was named
Amazon’s #1 Book of the Year . . . On stage, Colum McCann offers

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insight into the art of the writer’s craft, recounting examples from the
creation of his own bestselling novel, Let The Great World Spin. A poly-
phonic work set in the New York of the 1970s, but serving as an alle-
gory of the city’s resilient post-­9/11 self, Spin placed McCann—­whose
remarkable previous books include Zoli and Dancer—­at the very top
rank of contemporary novelists. Sometimes, nice guys finish first.

The promotional outline of his available talk reemphasizes the same

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key points: “on stage,” McCann is a top-­ranked author, skilled speaker,
and a nice guy:

On stage, Colum McCann provides a graceful look into the writer’s

craft and, specifically, the way he writes, which is to observe everything.
How does he use seemingly insignificant moments and fleeting interac-
tions to conjure a specific place in time? How does he breathe life into
complex characters, and, in the process, create a realistic sense of what
it means to be alive? Described by The New York Times as having “the
convivial charm of someone who enjoys lifting a glass with a wide circle
of friends,” McCann is as strong a speaker as he is a writer.

The way in which McCann is promoted by the Lavin Agency seems

to me to be significant, especially when taken in conjunction with
what McCann himself has said about the promotional obligations of
the contemporary bestselling author. The importance of promotion
in the contemporary literary world means that, in thinking about
issues of inspiration, creation, and production in relation to literary
geography, it is important to acknowledge and take into account the
very specific way in which the McCann figure is textually constructed
by his booking agency while at the same time, emphasizing that the
Colum McCann accessible through interviews, conversations, and
promotional materials not only can be but also really must be distin-
guished from the actual living person of the same name.
Taking this to, what seems to me to be, its logical conclusion, I am
assuming in this chapter that the professional figure “Colum McCann”
is as much a text event as are his novels, reasoning that this figure is
similarly produced through text and by means of rhetoric, style, and
reader response.23 Obviously, I do not mean to say that when Colum
McCann gives an interview, or performs “An Evening with Colum
McCann,” he—­the actual man—­is not present. Clearly, he is present.
Further, the basic biographical geographies of the historical McCann
and the professional McCann are so similar as to be practically identi-
cal, and I am not hinting at some kind of biographical obfuscation.

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 Geographies of Creation and Promotion 139

Rather, what I want to emphasize here is simply that in common with

most of the reading public I have no access to this actual person; I
know “Colum McCann” through his appearances in controlled and
staged settings such as readings and interviews (through texts, tran-
scripts, and video performances) and through edited and published
interviews and biographies.
The complexity of this author figure, Colum McCann, is usefully

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indicated by the recent interview mentioned previously, which begins
with a photograph of the author positioned apparently at work in his
cupboard space, sitting on the floor, with his laptop. This interview,
“Colum McCann’s Radical Empathy,” recounts how the interviewer,
Joel Lovell, and the author traveled together in April 2013 to New-
town, Connecticut, where McCann was going to “spend the day
talking to groups of high-­school students who had just finished read-
ing Let the Great World Spin”: “A few months earlier, shortly after
the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School, an English teacher
at Newtown High named Lee Keylock sent McCann a letter explain-
ing that he and a fellow teacher, Michelle Toby, had been searching,
somewhat desperately, for a book that might help their students begin
to make sense of their terrible shock and grief. Nothing in their cur-
riculum, Keylock said, gave them any kind of map for the place where
they all now lived, but he believed that McCann’s novel possibly
could.”24 Keylock explained to the journalist later how the idea for
the invitation had come to him:

So many of the kids in the high school had connections to the 20 chil-
dren and 6 adults who were killed—­they were siblings or baby sitters
or former students—­and so many of the teachers, too, were affected,
that they existed in a kind of collective traumatic haze. “I was mentally
lost . . . I was reminded by a grief counselor that people on planes are
told to put their own oxygen masks on before helping others to do
the same. I guess the analogy spoke to me in the sense that, yes, I was
bitter and angry and utterly destroyed about the events of 12/14 . . .
I suppose, however cliché it sounds, that McCann’s book was the first
drop of oxygen.”25

After reading The Great World, the high school students had a
chance to talk to the author in person, to share stories and talk about
the challenge of surviving trauma and despair. McCann was clearly
present in these exchanges, engaging sincerely with his readers. He had
been invited to visit the school, however, because of The Great World
and because of the author persona he has acquired: sincere, open to

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140 Literary Geographies

his readers, a “nice guy.” And we know about this visit because he was
accompanied by a journalist who wrote about it in a piece for the New
York Times Magazine that also talks in detail about McCann’s new
novel at the time, TransAtlantic. So this article testifies to McCann’s
sincerity and accessibility as a writer and to his “radical empathy” as a
person who listens to the real stories of other real people; but at the
same time, it provides a good example of the complicated interaction

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of promotion and reception in the creation and performance of the
author figure.
The Newtown interview implies that the professional Colum
McCann and the actual Colum McCann are very similar, although
of course there is really no way for most of us to get outside the text
event of the author “Colum McCann” and confirm this. My point
is that from a distance it is impossible to disentangle the two. Refus-
ing to take this as evidence of some kind of research lapse, I take
my cue from McCann’s comments on his use of the historical figure
Rudolf Nureyev in his novel Dancer (2003). While Nureyev was at
the center of the novel, McCann’s interest lay elsewhere: “I didn’t
really care about him per se,” says McCann. “I know that sounds
harsh.” So while it might seem that here, in this chapter on the geog-
raphies of inspiration, creation, and production, I should care about
Colum McCann above all things, in fact, to be clear, my interest is
on the professional figure, the image, the commodity—­and this is
done without suggesting any diminution in my respect for the actual
person, the living creative artist who produced The Great World. As
McCann says of Nureyev, “I always felt that Rudi was more than able
to look after himself. There have been, and will be, plenty more books
about Rudi.”26

Th e Autho r N ar r ates Hi mself

So the Colum McCann of whom I write in this chapter, then, is a
construct, a figure emerging into my view (my particular view) from
textual evidence, photographs, and a few interview videos; the sub-
ject of this chapter has to do with the creative geographies of that
figure (which are presumably a version of the actual creative geog-
raphies of the living author). As Graham Allen has argued, “When
we are dealing with literary forms of writing we cannot presume that
the language we are dealing with gives us direct access to the subject
who wrote it.”27 My point here is that even interviews and public
appearances in which the real McCann is present do not give us direct
access to the subject who wrote The Great World. McCann has written

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 Geographies of Creation and Promotion 141

of “imaginative access,” of “the texture of truth,” and that is why,

while I find it interesting that McCann has explained himself and told
anecdotes about his writing processes differently at different times, I
do not find this inconsistency to be a problem. In presenting—­even
performing—­himself in public, it seems to me that McCann is offer-
ing us “imaginative access” to the real living person, presenting “the
texture” of what is true about his creativity. For this reason, it seems

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unimportant to me that the McCann persona accessible through texts
contains contradictions, and that it tells a story of the geography of
his creativity in slightly different ways. The real McCann is, after all,
a storyteller, and the professional McCann is under obligation to rec-
oncile two major authorial obligations that pull in different directions:
on the one hand, the author has to endeavor to make every interview
worthwhile, to give the interviewer and the audience something new,
to go beyond simply repeating his ideas and his anecdotes time after
time. On the other hand, he cannot veer too far from the essentials of
what he has said before, even though (obviously) over time his opin-
ions and positions will change.
Because readers in general gain imaginative access into the life of
an author through reading, through texts that are all simultaneously
available—­fiction and interviews and articles and books, all just one
or two clicks away on the computer—­it is only too easy to forget that
people change, and that the professional McCann who was performed
(by the living McCann) in a public conversation in 2008 is going to
be a slightly different figure to the McCann who was performed, for
example, at Fairfield University in 2010. McCann makes this point
himself in the Zoli interview: “I remember once I told an interviewer
that writing about real-­life people represented a ‘failure of the imagi-
nation.’ Well, a couple of years later I was writing about Rudolph
Nureyev. That says it all. I never know where I’m going to end up.”28
As a globally popular writer (and engaging speaker), McCann is
in great demand, and there are already a large number of interviews
available online in transcript form, in video, or in articles. McCann has
explained (in one of the interviews now accessible online, appropri-
ately enough) that while he enjoys “doing the promotion,” talking to
readers, giving interviews, and going to literary parties, he struggles
with the issue of online accessibility and the pressure to say something
new for every new audience:

For me, the hard part is I try as much as I possibly can not to repeat
myself. It used to be if you did an interview with the Minneapolis Star
Tribune, that’s it, you did an interview in Minneapolis. It was there for

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142 Literary Geographies

a day. But now, you do the interview and it goes online and it’s available
everywhere for a long time. So, that’s something that doesn’t get talked
about enough maybe: journalists with a much longer shelf [life] than
ever before. This stuff now lasts. We’re all just [a] click away.29

McCann’s discomfort with this pressure is palpable in the manner

in which he deals with questions about contemporary influences on
his writing and other living writers he admires. Aware that any omis-

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sion, while momentary, is going to have a permanent life, he tends to
hedge, cautiously: “I hate doing lists,” he says, “because I know that I
forget people then I remember them five minutes later and I think . . .
Well . . .”30
The difficulties involved in providing a good interview while at the
same time maintaining a coherent public identity also become clear
when we consider a story McCann has told at least four times in inter-
views, an interesting and at the same time charming and humanizing
story of being disturbed, while deeply involved in his writing, by one
of his children. The story obviously provides some insight into the
microscale geography of his creative process: in these anecdotes he is
always physically present in his home and in his own body but at the
same time relationally far distant, inhabiting another imagined body
in a different place and time. The sudden communication from the
physical present, the interruption (from his son) breaks into his cre-
ative disembodiment and pulls him back from an imagined fictional
environment to the here and now of the immediate environment of
the room in which he writes and the family home.
In 2008, before Let the Great World Spin was in print, McCann
participated in a public conversation with Michael Ondaatje at the
New York Public Library. McCann spoke in that conversation of the
pleasure he experienced while imagining himself into character. “You
enjoy that moment of surprise,” he explains, “when you wake up and
you are in a body that is not your own. The phone rings—­or, for
me, a child slips a note under the door that says, ‘Daddy, let’s go
play soccer.’ And I think, ‘I’m a sixty-­eight year old gypsy woman—­I
can’t go play soccer right now.’”31 The reference to the Gypsy woman
seems likely to be to a central character in McCann’s 2007 novel Zoli,
his most recent work of fiction at the time of the interview.32 A year
later, in 2009, the anecdote reappears in an interview with McCann
that appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine. Here the story is reconfig-
ured: the interrupted McCann is no longer pulled back from being
sixty-­eight years old and a Gypsy; now he is thirty-­eight years old
and living in 1970s New York. “It’s bizarre channeling a 38-­year-­old

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 Geographies of Creation and Promotion 143

grandmother who’s a prostitute, and then suddenly a note from my

kid slips under my door that says: Daddy, let’s go play soccer.”33
According to the transcript of a conversation held at the Cheltenham
Literature Festival (in the United Kingdom), McCann performed a
third version of this anecdote there three months later:

Colum McCann: . . . one afternoon I was working away and—­I work

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at home in my office, and I see this note being slid in under the door.
My kids are not allowed to knock on my door or anything because I’m
working, and I see this note being . . .
[interviewer]: Gee, you’re strict . . .
Colum McCann: Yeah, well I have to be strict. I see this thing like
sliding in under the door. Daddy, let’s go play soccer, you know? I said,
“I can’t go play soccer, I’m a 38-­year-­old hooker in the Bronx. We
don’t play soccer.”34

Then, four months after the Cheltenham conversation, in an inter-

view given at Fairfield University (in the United States), McCann
“shared some of the struggles he had as a writer trying to write in his
characters’ voices, in particular Tillie, the hooker”: “‘It took me six
months to find her voice and when I found it, she wrote it herself.’ He
recalled writing in Tillie’s voice one day when one of his young sons
slipped a piece of paper beneath his door saying, ‘Daddy, let’s go play
soccer in Central Park’ . . . I said, ‘I can’t play soccer in Central Park,
I’m a 38-­year-­old hooker.’”35 Clearly, this anecdote—­despite the dif-
ferences in the four accounts—­does give the reader what McCann
would term imaginative access into his life and creative processes, even
while it almost certainly does not give access to the specificity of a
single actual event. But at the same time, the four variant versions
also surely indicate the way in which the Colum McCann figure who
comes into existence in interviews is a construction, an amalgam, and
a performance. This is in no sense intended as a criticism.
The performance by the actual Colum McCann of the public
“Colum McCann” as an accessible and engaging author is an impor-
tant element in the complex set of practices that have produced and
continue to produce the novel Let the Great World Spin as an interac-
tive text event. This public persona reflects what McCann has said
about his interest in his readers and his willingness to hand his novel
over to those readers for completion, to collaborate with his readers
in the production of his fiction. When McCann talks of the “space” of
his work, he refers to it as a space for the reader, a “space to undergo
experience, or empathize”; the space of The Great World can be a

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liminal zone into “which readers enter, carrying their own thoughts,”
ready to “participate in a conversation.”36 In the next chapter, the focus
shifts toward these readers. Interestingly, it turns out that McCann’s
readers (particularly readers who function as reviewers, bloggers, and
reading-­group organizers) contribute not only to conversation that
makes the text happen as fiction but also to the processes by which
the readers are recruited, which is to say, to promotion and marketing.

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 Chapter 10

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Geographies of Reception

Reader s
I n this chapter the discussion turns finally to the reception side of the
interactive text event, with a discussion of ways in which The Great
World has been grasped by readers, reviewers, book groups, and the
media. This chapter also continues the focus of the previous chapter
on promotion by looking at the ways in which various forms of reader
response to the text have been (and are being) incorporated into the
processes of marketing. These reader responses include, for example,
the “blurbs” by professional reviewers and well-­known authors that
conventionally form an integral part of cover designs. Another genre
of reader response in which the distinction between reception and
promotion becomes blurred relates to the use of websites (such as
TLC Book Tours) that host “virtual book tours,” posting a review of
a text and encouraging comments from other readers. The complex
networks of mutual obligation, entrepreneurship, and criticism that
enable and are made visible by these reception/promotion activities
provide the literary geographer with a valuable resource for the analy-
sis of the mechanisms through which certain novels become widely
read.
Obviously, in order to engage with a novel and thereby participate
in that particular event of fiction, a reader must first gain access to one
of the available texts: The Great World is widely available from physical
and online bookstores, in a variety of English-­language editions and
also in several foreign language translations. Having read the novel
(or at least having embarked on a reading), even perhaps reread it,
some readers will discuss the novel and their reading with friends
and colleagues, or in book groups and online, while others may write

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146 Literary Geographies

blog posts about it. McCann takes these engaged readers seriously:
The Great World, he says, “is completed only when it is finished by a
reader.”1 The approach to fiction underpinning this study—­the idea
that the novel can be usefully understood as a spatial event—­assumes
that the event of the text is an unfolding process whose parts can-
not be unproblematically assigned to the various participating agents
(author, text, translators, readers). This means that reader reception

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is as crucial an element to the event of the text as inspiration and
promotion. The process of the text event has to be understood, in
other words, in terms of a dynamic interaction, a process of engage-
ment across various kinds of distance through which fiction becomes
regenerated and renegotiated in the process of being collaboratively
written, published, distributed, read, and discussed.2 “I’m nothing
without a good reader,” McCann insists.3 He might also add that he
would also not be much without a good publisher and a good agent—­
and in some cases, a good translator.

R ec eptio n as P ro mot i on
As indicated previously, although this chapter concentrates on recep-
tion, it acknowledges that production, promotion, and reception are
intertwined in complex ways and that these various aspects of the
text event have been separated here for purely tactical reasons. The
cover design of the 2009 Random House trade paperback edition
of The Great World, for example, obviously part of the publisher’s
promotional strategy, includes not only a reproduction of a drawing
by Matteo Pericoli and essential information such as the product title,
author, publisher, price in US dollars, definition (“fiction”), and bar
code for stock checking and scanning at the point of sale, but also ten
comments from reviewers and other authors. A further four pages of
“Praise for Let the Great World Spin” is included right at the start of
the paperback text, prior to the page giving bibliographical informa-
tion. Here, in other words, reception is being employed as an element
of promotion. The cover design also advertises the fact that McCann
is the author of two other novels (Zoli and Dancer), indicates that the
novel is a “Random House Reader’s Choice” and a “National Book
Award Winner,” and further suggests to readers that they should
“look for the discussion guide inside” and also consider joining “the
Circle”—­“for author chats and more.” The “blurbs” that make up
part of the cover—­comments from prominent readers—­have clearly
been carefully selected and then neatly integrated into the overall
design as part of the advertising for the book. The prominence in

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 Geographies of Reception 147

the cover design and the front-­page material of the book’s favorable
reception shows how important an element reviews are to the pub-
lisher’s publicity campaign, and the use of “blurbs” thus indicates one
of the ways in which promotion and reception are interwoven.
Blurbs are written by professional readers (reviewers) and pro-
fessional writers (other authors); while they are evidence of reader
response, the extent to which the response is driven by promotion is

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unclear. It is well known, for example, that author blurbs are solicited
and that there is a system of some kind of mutual aid network of
authors blurbing for each other. A 2011 essay in the online literary
magazine The Millions makes it clear that dealing with requests for
blurbs is a fact of life for many well-­known authors today.4 As a result,
it seems—­in self-­defense—­“many writers who have hit the best-­seller
lists or won major awards have a strict policy of not writing blurbs.”
Colum McCann himself “admits that he has been tempted to step
into the blurb-­free zone” because of the overwhelming demand. “In
the past week I got exactly eight books in the post to blurb,” McCann
tells The Millions. “I also got six separate e-­mail requests from publish-
ers and friends. Then I got two requests from former students. That’s
a total of sixteen requests in just one week.” As the article points out,
if that week is taken as typical, McCann would be receiving something
like 832 requests a year. Interestingly, McCann seems to think that
blurbs are not so much aimed at potential readers (book buyers) as
at book stores: “They’re not even designed for readers since I think
most people see through the bullshit factor,” he explains. “They are
designed more for bookshops and just helping to get the books on the
shelf.” But McCann adds that he understands the necessity for blurbs,
acknowledging that the blurbs for The Great World “were very, very
important to its initial bookshop push. They helped the book suc-
ceed.” Blurbs, then, are a good example not only of the interaction
of promotion and reception but also of the importance of a writers’
network.
The blurbs on the cover of The Great World also indicate the
importance of geography to promotion and reader reception: the
geographical spread of the blurbs might indicate how important pub-
lishers think it is to suggest to book buyers (stores or individuals) that
a novel has a nationwide appeal. This might be particularly significant
in the case of a novel such as The Great World, in which the theme and
setting—­ both strongly New York focused—­ might otherwise seem
limited by its geographical specificity. Four of the ten blurbs on the
cover of the 2009 Random House trade paperback edition are attrib-
uted to named authors, implying the assumption of a promotional

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network effect. Five other blurbs simply give the title of the publica-
tion in which the review appeared. The quotation most prominently
displayed, on the front of the book, is the one that gives not only the
title of the publication but also the name of the reviewer: “Jonathan
Mahler, The New York Times Book Review.” The five unattributed pub-
lication blurbs come from USA Today, a national newspaper, O, The
Oprah Magazine, a national magazine, The Seattle Times and the San

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Francisco Chronicle, West Coast publications, and the New Orleans
Times-­Picayune from the South. The East Coast gets its nod from the
cover art (depicting New York City) and from the cover quotation
from The New York Times Book Review. In this way, the blurbs for
this US trade paperback edition perform a transcontinental geography
that also ranges from the popular (O) to the literary (The New York
Times Book Review).
Of course, there is more to a cover design for a new book than
blurbs: potential purchasers (or booksellers) are affected not only
by the quotations and the other textual information but also by the
design itself. For McCann, the fact that different editions of the book,
published in different places and different languages, have different
covers indicates a rather positive, location-­based multiplicity: “It’s
interesting to me how different countries have completely different
covers. In England it was a guy bent over backwards, in a sort of wry
ironic way. In France it was a figure high in the sky. In Germany it was
a constructionist cover, a man rolling up on a globe. It says so much
about how different we are, how vast and spinning this globe is.”5 Evi-
dence from online book discussion websites, however, indicates that
readers are not always attracted by the cover to the edition they find
on sale and are not clear about why different editions have different
covers. Arti, a blogger posting on Ripple Effects on April 27, 2011,
reviews the novel in a post titled “How Not to Judge a Book by Its
Cover.” Arti explains that although there was “a lot of buzz when this
book came out a couple of years ago . . . I’ve been avoiding it, albeit
a bit curious to know what it’s about. My reason? I just didn’t like the
cover, still don’t.” The off-­putting cover is that of the original hard-
back UK edition, which features an image of a man in a suit bending
over backward like a contortionist. Apparently, this was the only edi-
tion available to the blogger at first. Having read (and enjoyed) the
novel, Arti contrasts the off-­putting effect of the uncomfortable UK
cover with the cover of the US edition featuring the Pericoli draw-
ing: “If I’d seen this cover in the store, I would have grabbed it at
first sight.” On April 28, a blog reader, Jeanie, comments below the
line: “Interesting about cover art, isn’t it? It can certainly make a big

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 Geographies of Reception 149

difference as to whether we pick it up or not!” Then another reader,

Ruth, adds on May 1: “I’m intrigued by book covers, and by the ways
we respond to them. I am more attracted by the second cover too . . .
I wonder how the success of book covers is measured, and do they
choose different covers for different bookstores? It would be a fun
book group discussion!”
The so-­called virtual book tour is another case in which reception

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is integrated into promotion and the commonsense binary dissolves.
The Great World was promoted, for example, by TLC Book Tours,
which according to the TLC website (as of May 25, 2010), “are a
promotional tool for authors to connect with readers via well-­read
book blogs and specialty blogs.” While TLC Book Tours may give
the appearance of being simply an online connecting facility bringing
various book blogs and discussion groups together, they are marketed
as promotional tools for authors: “At TLC, you can expect the highest
level of customer service and attention to detail. With more than 20+
years combined customer relations, sales, and marketing background
between them, Trish and Lisa are highly motivated professionals com-
mitted to getting the word out about your book and facilitating your
virtual tour.” TLC Book Tours is a paid service for book promotion:
as the page on “services” explains, “Our basic tour is a 10-­blog virtual
book tour. Authors gain exposure to thousands of potential readers
via book blogs and specialty blogs. This tour guarantees your book
will be reviewed and featured on a minimum of 10 well-­read, carefully
selected blogs during the course of one month . . . Please email for
the rate.”
The TLC website includes a page of testimonials from authors
who have used the service. David Ebershoff, for example, writes in a
blurb that “by the end of my virtual tour, my novel was all over the
blogosphere. TLC Book Tours did a fantastic job helping me connect
directly with readers and further publicize my book.” Bloggers have
to apply to be selected for participation in a book tour. For successful
applicants, the “Be a Tour Host” page explains that “as a host, you
agree to receive a free book from one of our touring authors . . . read
it and post a review on a date scheduled in advance for the author to
‘stop’ at your blog.” The information page for tour hosts adds that
“touring authors will usually be available for guest posts, interviews,
question and answer sessions.” In addition, while bloggers promote
authors on their websites, TLC explains on the “Be a Tour Host”
page that authors in turn “promote the tour stops on their websites,
and TLC will also do promotion.” TLC is particularly interested in
“well read, well trafficked book blogs.”

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150 Literary Geographies

TLC Book Tours opens up some interesting questions not only

about the distinction between promotion and reception but also
about the difference between “ordinary readers” and professional
critics. Writing on “the social lives of books,” Edward Finn has even
argued that “changing models of literary production are blurring
or erasing the divisions between authors, critics and readers.”6 Finn
sees this reconfiguration of the literary world as a result of the fact

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that “cultural consumers are participating in previously closed liter-
ary conversations and expressing forms of mass distinction through
their purchases and reviews of books,” and he notes how this online
evidence enables “a fresh perspective on elusive audience reactions to
literature” as it reveals “evolving networks of conversation.”

R e l ati o n al G eo gr aphies o f Recepti on

Reader networks of conversation are often today sustained online
rather than in face-­to-­face meetings or postal correspondence, and
this raises an interesting spatial dimension to the issue of the location
and interaction of a novel’s readership. The geography of reception
includes both a locational geography and a relational geography, and
with the rise of book blogs and online book discussions, it has become
increasingly problematic to associate particular ways of reading with
specific geographical locations. Reception geography as a whole still
of course includes matters such as where copies of the book are sold,
which formats and which versions (e.g., translations) are sold in which
locations, and which locations show particularly high sales figures; it
also includes how the book is reviewed in differently located pub-
lications and how the novel and its author are received in specific
locations (e.g., on book tours in which the author physically travels
from place to place). Nevertheless, the more relational geography of
reception is becoming increasingly important, including as it does a
widening range of forms of reader interactions—­not only the micro-
geography of book groups whose members meet face-­to-­face for dis-
cussion but also the much more dispersed geography of book groups
managing their discussions online.
The spatial production of fiction by multiple collaborating agents
is in this sense becoming ever more complex, involving (as ever) both
individuality and collectivity, unique readings and social contexts, but
now also being mediated by new spaces of online discussion. The
impact of various social contexts becomes visible in the articulation
of readings, and of course in practice, articulated readings are all we
have: in looking at reader response and in attempting to understand

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 Geographies of Reception 151

how readers actually engage with and develop particular reactions

to particular texts, the individual reader is an impenetrable mystery.
There is no reliable or objective way to investigate individual reading
processes; all we have is what readers say about their readings, and (as
noted in the introductory chapters) in the process of communicating
ideas and opinions about a text, the reader, who is also a speaker or
a writer, will modulate his or her impression of the text according to

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the context of discussion. As I have argued elsewhere, “Fictional text
events are not only relational by nature and generated within social
contexts to start with, but further only become publicly accessible
when subsequently articulated within the mediating context of a par-
ticular social situation. Performed readings or interpretations are thus
produced in relation to at least two geographies, the first being the
geography of the initial text event, and the second being the geog-
raphy of the context in which the reader’s experience of that event
is later narrated.”7 In other words, while the reading process itself is
always relationally produced, this relational aspect to reading becomes
even more pronounced in the expression of reactions, as the exter-
nalization of the interior reading process will tend to be even more
context sensitive, and online discussions in various formats are provid-
ing readers with more and more opportunities to engage with other
readers and articulate, defend, develop, and revise their own readings.
An exchange on the August 2010 book club discussion section of
the College Confidential Parent Café website provides a good exam-
ple of this in practice. Toward the end of the discussion period, terwitt
comments, “Oh my . . . since I’ve not participated in an online book
discussion, I’ve mostly been lurking here, but I did finish the book
and really enjoyed it.” Mary13 responds, “We love lurkers who come
out of the woodwork. Rest assured that there are no rules to our
online discussions.” The idea that there might be “rules” to book
group discussions, even as Mary13 denies that these exist in the case
of the College Confidential Book Club discussion, reminds us of the
significance of the context for articulation of reader response. In the
New York Times online Big City Book Club discussion of September
2011, singsgood explicitly refers to the learning process that goes on
as readers negotiate the protocol of book club discussions: “I read this
book as part of a book club assignment, and it being my first book
club experience, I wasn’t sure how to join the discussion of a book I
strongly disliked. Thanks so much for providing a model of reasonable
and thoughtful comments, and I found, through John Walsh, Com-
ment 66, a way to express my distaste without disparaging the views
of those who did enjoy the novel.” Mary13’s reference to “lurkers” is

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152 Literary Geographies

a useful reminder that even with an accessible online book discussion,

some readers who are participating in a discussion primarily by their
(visible or invisible) presence will be impacted by the comments of
other readers.
Online discussion groups and blogs in which readers record their
experiences as they read a novel chapter by chapter also provide useful
evidence of the ways in which reader reactions to a text may change

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even during the course of a first reading. Again, to restate a point made
in the introductory chapters, a single reader may respond differently
to the same text under different circumstances—­on first reading and
subsequent rereadings, for example—­and furthermore, any reader is
likely to express his or her impression of a text differently in different
contexts. While these changes may appear to be primarily a matter of
time, they also result from a reader’s continuous process of relocation
in social and literary space, a relocation that might, for example, be
affected by the very process of engaging with other readers or poten-
tial readers, even by the process of articulating a response. As Jane
Tompkins argues, there is “never a case in which circumstances do not
affect the way people read and hence what they read—­the text itself.”8
The complex relational geographies of different readers will inevi-
tably be woven into those contexts, habits, and modes of reading. In
her work on Salman Rushdie, mentioned in the previous chapter, and
also in a later review article for Area, Joanne Sharp has made the point
that authors have little control over how their work is read. Colum
McCann acknowledges this explicitly in interviews: “I’d hate to think
that you or I or anyone else would tell people how to think,” he
has said, disavowing any didactic purpose to his work. McCann sees
the “space” of his work as something quite different to a “didactic
space”—­rather, it is a “space to undergo experience, or empathize,”
so that in his writing, McCann sees himself creating for his readers a
“space for change . . . a space for grace.” McCann made these remarks
in one of his conversations with Aleksandar Hemon, who concurred:
“I like the idea of a book being a democratic space.” For Hemon, as
(it seems) for McCann, a work of fiction is a democratic space into
“which readers enter, carrying their own thoughts, and participate
in a conversation, or experience of grace.”9 McCann denies that the
“social novel” is limited by its air of the political; rather, he says, “I see
the social novel as an open text, an open field for us to step into, and
maybe breathe in a new air.” He highlights the role of the reader in
this process, arguing that “it’s up to the reader to make sense of this.
A novel has to be left open, so a reader can step inside.”

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 Geographies of Reception 153

One of the key points about literary geography to which geogra-

pher Joanne Sharp has drawn attention is that agency is exercised in
very different ways by different readers. While it may seem that critics
trained in the techniques of literary criticism have a more authorita-
tive position as readers, or that their readings are more likely to access
“the real meaning” of a text, the recent move in literary geography
to view the author-­text-­reader interaction as a spatial event undercuts

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that assumption by viewing specialist academic and nonspecialist pub-
lic readings “not so much as essentially different practices but as the
same kind of practice differently conditioned by context, conventions,
and expectations.”10 Literary critics in this configuration are just one
genre of readers among many, and (outside the frame of academic lit-
erary studies) their readings are no more authentic or significant than
others. One of the challenges for literary geography is to find a way to
check the urge to interpret—­to create an exhaustive or authoritative
reading—­with the acknowledgment that, in a social science context,
the highly technical examination of a text may be of less value than
an exploration of the full range of reader response as it can be under-
stood in various spatial configurations. The reception of a literary
work has its own geography, and the spatial aspects of the ways in
which a text has been “received, interpreted and read by its various
audiences” thus provides literary geography with an important area
for consideration.11
The relatively recent emergence of a literary milieu existing
online—­a literary environment that includes reader blogs and book
discussion groups—­has provided literary geography with a hugely
useful research resource for the study of spatialities of reader recep-
tion. There have already been a few scholars working in literary
geography who have made use of this resource. Erica Yap, for exam-
ple, arguing in 2011 that methodological practice has lagged behind
theoretical acknowledgment of the role of the reader in literary geog-
raphy, engaged in a study of “the dynamic co-­enactment of responses
by multiple readers-­in-­conversations” by looking at online interac-
tions involving 21 readers of Singaporean poetry. The results of her
study challenge the idea of readers as “passive and homogeneous,”
even within one specifically localized sample.12 Studies of this kind
are complicating our understanding of the geography of reception
considerably.

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L o c ati o n s and C o ntex ts o f Recepti on

Posts on online discussion forums in this way provide useful infor-
mation about the emergence of technologically mediated social con-
texts for reading and exchanging opinions and ideas about literary
texts. They also, along the way, provide some incidental informa-
tion regarding other aspects of reception geography—­exchanges in
the College Confidential Parent Café book club selection discussion

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(June–­August 2010), for example, indicate the variety of formats and
locations of individual reading experiences. “I am saving it for a long
plane flight I am taking in early August,” mom60 posted on July 7,
immediately complicating the assumption that the location of reading
is singular. In other words, while the assumption is usually that a novel
is read in a specific location, it’s well known that one of the primary
contexts in which reading takes place is while traveling—­actually in
transit or while away from home on business trips or vacations. Books
are read in planes, on trains, and in cars as audiobooks; they are read
on beaches and in hotels. One participant in the College Confidential
discussion mentions, for example, that she will be discussing the book
online with the College Confidential group and also in the “Books on
the Beach” club “here in our beach house community”; this is a useful
reminder that the context in which reader response is articulated, even
by a single reader, may be multiple. Other members of the book club
discussion mention ordering the book online, putting it on reserve
at the local library, and downloading it onto a Kindle ebook reader.
Comments make it clear that while some readers like to prepare them-
selves for a reading by looking at reviews and summaries, others prefer
to know as little as possible about the available context prior to their
own reading: “I finished the book last night,” one commenter posted
in July, prior to the opening of the August discussion. “That’s all I’m
saying until August.” This comment is followed seven minutes later
by another: “Thanks for your restraint! I want to be surprised.” While
one commenter posts about watching the documentary Man on Wire
before reading, Mary13 notes that she is “staying away from book
reviews” because she decided she wanted to “go into the book know-
ing nothing at all about the plot or the historical incident that it’s built
around.” SouthJerseyChessMom adds that she did the same thing—­
“Didn’t do ANY background at all, and let the book flow over me.”
The importance of the context in which a reading is articulated is
emphasized by the tone in which comments are posted. In the College
Confidential discussion, and in the book club discussion hosted by the
New York Times Big City Book Club, some readers speak confidently

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 Geographies of Reception 155

and authoritatively, while others present their comments more ten-

tatively; there is disagreement and there is also evidence that readers
learn from each other’s comments. In the College Confidential dis-
cussion, for example, a commenter asks for thoughts on why some
stories are told “from a first-­person perspective” while others are not.
About an hour after the question is posted, another participant agrees
that the difference in narrative voice is interesting but develops the

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question by making the technical distinction between “first person”
chapters and “third person limited” chapters, both of which may have
a single perspective, despite the different voice.
Readers share information about some of the intertextual refer-
ences (“Locksley Hall,” for example, is quoted in both the College
Confidential and the Big City Book Club discussions) and sometimes
confirm each other’s readings. Posting to the College Confidential
website, one commenter remarks, “It’s enlightening (and lots of fun)
to read everyone’s comments about the book.” Another finds some of
the questions a bit too much: after ignatius introduces some questions
with the instruction “Think AP English Lit test,” Mary13 replies,
“ignatius, I’m glad my English AP Lit test days are over. You’re giving
me hives just thinking about those types of questions.” While there is
some gentle disagreement, there is also evidence of an emerging con-
sensus and a sense of group collectivity: “Why do we dislike that last
chapter so much?” asks SouthJerseyChessMom toward the end of the
discussion; another comments, “Terrible to say and I may be booted
out of the book club, but I felt that McCann needed to meet his con-
tracted 350 or so pages and just wrote til he got there.”
Compared to the New York Times Big City Book Club discussion,
the tone in the College Confidential discussion generally is less intense
and less critical, and there is more of a sense of community. As men-
tioned in the earlier chapter on literary space, one notable theme to
the criticisms posted to the New York Times book club is the historical
accuracy of the novel’s primary setting, New York City in 1974; in this
case, it seems that the affective geography (New York related) of the
reading group has an effect on the collective reading of the novel’s fic-
tional geography. One of the markers the commenters use to suggest a
position of authority in the Big City Book Club discussion is that they
lived through the 1970s in New York and as a result are competent
to assess its setting. The influence of the physical location of the New
York Times seems to spill over into the discussion section of its online
book club; perhaps more New Yorkers read the NYT online—­or per-
haps the reputation of The Great World as a book “about New York
City” drew a particularly New York City–­oriented readership.

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Resisting Reader s
One final important form of reader response needs to be acknowl-
edged again here in relation to McCann’s conviction that a novel “is
completed only when it is finished by a reader.” As discussed earlier
(in “the plastic bag problem” section of Chapter 4), some readers—­
“resisting readers”—­refuse to contribute this completion. The role of
the reader in the event of the text, as examples of resistance and criti-

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cism remind us, is a complex one. Even negative reviews and dismis-
sive comments in book groups can function as elements, for example,
in a book’s promotion. Some readers, like Mary13 on the College
Confidential discussion, who otherwise appreciate The Great World
are clear that they think the novel should have ended with the last of
the 1974 chapters, finding the final 2006 chapter narrated by Jaslyn
disappointing and rambling, and wishing that the “the book would
have ended with Gloria’s voice”—­“a hopeful, affirmative ending to
the story.” Other readers simply do not appreciate the book at all and
feel no urge to complete it by collaborating with its narrative. Read-
ers who report not having liked the book comment from a distance,
refuse to engage, and sometimes give up reading. Some readers—­
like Nelson, participating in the New York Times discussion—­found
that the characters were “just not very interesting,” too predictable:
“About halfway through the book I realized that the poetry and mys-
tery of the first chapter was not going to be matched in the rest of the
book. So I put the book down and moved on.” Others—­like Miguel,
in the same discussion—­just disliked the book as a whole: “I stopped
halfway into the second story because I found the writing second rate
and the characters somewhat cliché.”
It is worth noting, however, that we know about these read-
ers who disliked the book, because despite their lack of enthusiasm
they bothered to contribute to an online book discussion. Miguel,
for example—­who “stopped halfway into the second story”—­ends
his comment by asking if other participants think he should give it
another chance. “Was I missing something?” he asks. “Does it get
better?” Others who actually liked the book make very strong com-
ments about the things they disliked: interestingly, in light of the
idea of the reader as contributor, these comments often lay out very
clearly how they think the book could have been improved. Some
commenters engage with the book and “complete” it, while at the
same time maintaining a critical distance and focusing on aspects they
felt did not work. One such commenter on the New York Times dis-
cussion, brauner, after starting with the comment “very good book,”

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 Geographies of Reception 157

immediately goes on to “be curmudgeonly” by focusing on “what

doesn’t work.”

First, it ain’t a novel. It’s a series of short stories. Calling it a novel

doesn’t make it so, and deception is a bad way to start things out.
Linking characters in brief, cute ways doesn’t make it a novel. Why this
matters: I like a story that goes deeper than these do . . . Other cranky

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complaints: the graffiti, uh, “artist” and the West Coast ARPANET
kids were dead-­end stories that added nothing. It’s like the author was
saying, “Plus, there was a lot of graffiti at the time, and don’t forget
the Internet came around later and was important, but it started back
around this time.”

The “curmudgeonly” commenter switches tone again at the conclu-

sion: “These issues notwithstanding, an excellent book.” A later com-
menter, Ireland, joins this thread of the conversation: “I appreciate
brauner’s comments in ways . . . but I like the way the novel moves
around the huge ballroom of the city . . . The fragmentation works,
I think.”
Readers who just flat-­out dislike the book nonetheless evidently
do in some cases participate in the discussion and apparently enjoy
the process. Participating in the New York Times book discussion, the
reader PA commented, “Well, I appreciate that the book is inspiring a
lively conversation, but personally, this native New Yorker found the
book a cliched mess, overlong, pretentious, full of dialogue and sce-
narios that jarred with overreaching inauthenticity . . . McCann wrote
a not-­so-­great-­book, but it succeeded anyway . . . because he had a
great—­irresistible you could say—­concept.” And this, of course, is a
useful reminder that even readers who refuse to “complete” the book,
who refuse to accept their reading role as a participant in a conversa-
tion with the text/author, nevertheless sometimes continue to engage
with other readers. In other words, resisting readers who are visible in
online discussions did not abandon engagement with the text event,
even when they abandoned the book.

Novel E vents
Colum McCann’s visit to the high school in Newtown, introduced in
the previous chapter in the context of a discussion of the complexity
of the author figure, can also be read as an example of a particular
kind of “novel event.” In the wake of the shootings at Sandy Hook
Elementary School, and feeling that nothing in their curriculum

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158 Literary Geographies

offered the students “any kind of map for the place where they all
now lived,” teachers at the school turned to The Great World, believ-
ing that “McCann’s novel possibly could” provide that kind of solace
and guidance.13 The high school teachers thus set in motion a very
particular kind of text event in which group reading, discussion, and
interaction with the author were all involved. Turning to fiction as a
coping mechanism can be compared to some extent with the way in

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which Lara turns to The Great Gatsby to make sense of her life (dis-
cussed previously in Chapter 8), in particular, after the fatal car crash.
Both the Newtown high school event and Lara’s Gatsby-­inflected nar-
rative shaping represent a coming-­together of literal and lived space in
the search for meaning at a time of trauma. The Newtown high school
example is, of course, exceptional, but it does give some insight into
the ways in which social, material, and literary spaces come together
in collective reading events.
A less fraught example of such a collective event, which took place
in the fall of 2013 at Duke University, provides the final example of
reader response for this chapter. The Great World had been selected
earlier the same year as the official summer reading book for the
incoming class of 2017, by a committee made up of faculty, staff, and
undergraduate students. According to the news release on the uni-
versity website, third-­year student and committee member Valentine
Esposito explained that the book had been chosen because it “has a
storyline to which every incoming freshman can relate”: “The book
ties together the lives of several very different characters,” Esposito
said. “It is a really interesting parallel to the when you first come to
Duke and you meet so many different types of people, and you dive
into experiences that every freshman has, and it really ties everyone
together.” She added that the book was a favorite within the commit-
tee because it was “beautifully written.”14
Other committee members emphasized that the novel “presents
the reader with a wide variety of larger themes,” noting that compared
to the summer reading for previous years, The Great World would gen-
erate “a greater breadth of discussion” because of the novel’s themes
of “fear, hope, love and loss.” Esposito, however, drew a direct con-
nection between the narrative style of the novel and the experience of
the incoming students:

The summer reading book should be relatable to the Duke experience,

and I think Let the Great World Spin is the perfect choice with this con-
sideration in mind . . . The book stitches together the experiences of a
diverse group of people living in New York by depicting a single event

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 Geographies of Reception 159

they all witnessed or interacted with. At Duke, you will meet many
people that are different from yourself in every sense . . . In my opinion,
the beauty of the Duke experience is coming to appreciate these differ-
ences while recognizing the events and moments that stitch everyone’s
Duke experience together.

The event of the novel that emerged from the selection of The

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Great World as the summer reading for the class of 2017 at Duke—­a
collective event that was the culmination of multiple individual
readings—­illustrates several key points about the geography of fiction
that have been raised in this study. First, it provides another example
of the amalgamation of social, material, and literary space and the idea
that fiction can function in the extratextual world as some kind of
“map” or model; thus committee member Madison Moyle, like Val-
entine Esposito, drew clear parallels between the novel’s themes and
the reading context of the incoming students: “I think the incoming
freshmen will have the opportunity to engage in discussion surround-
ing the substantive themes in this book, and will be reminded that
risk-­taking, selflessness, and the courage to step outside of a comfort
zone are important things to remember in the first semester on Duke’s
campus.”15 Second, a strongly negative response to the book—­noted
in a comment added to the Duke Student Affairs blog post announc-
ing the selection—­is a useful reminder first, of how a text event spins
out across space-­time (in this case, into a Duke alumni group) and
second, of how even a work as generally well received as McCann’s
novel can still inspire strongly resistant readings:

Our Duke alumni group in Wilmington, DE read and discussed the

required reading Let the World Spin. As I read it I truly was appalled
that a fine university was asking this book to supposedly “enrich intel-
lectual life.” The first half was only to show that everyone from a pros-
titute to an eastside matron could use the F word . . . I would not have
finished reading if we were not discussing the book . . . Our group
thought it was better than last year’s selection so I would wonder who
is making these selections and implore them to find books more worthy
of a Duke student.

The Duke collective reading by incoming freshmen also provides

an example of how a particular event, once it reaches a certain size, can
literally affect both the materiality of the work and the promotion/
reception interaction between author and readers: the announce-
ment of the selection in the Duke University Chronicle in March

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160 Literary Geographies

mentions that the committee “is working to arrange a campus visit

from McCann in the Fall” and that incoming freshmen “will receive
copies from a special printing of the novel in July.”
McCann did in fact visit the campus on August 30, 2013, speak-
ing to students in the Baldwin Auditorium. He “gave first years
advice on the college experience, spoke about his writing process and
fielded questions about the intricacies of the novel.” McCann also, as

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it turned out, talked about what he called the “four-­letter f-­word,”
but in his remarks to students, that word was “fail.” “The process of
embracing the idea that you might possibly fail is the most vivifying
experience,” he told his audience. According to a report of the event
in the Duke Chronicle, at least one first-­year student found his words
helpful, showing how her reading of the novel had become woven
together with her experience at Duke and McCann’s visit in person.
“I love how he talked about accepting difficult times,” the student
commented. “We’re all at Duke and have just finished our first week
of classes, so it’s definitely on our minds as we are all already facing
challenges.”16 And in his discussion with students, McCann followed
through on his commitment to giving the reader space: his view on
authorial intent being, he has said, that it “doesn’t matter much once
the book is out there . . . What the reader sees on the page is what’s
there.”17 At the Duke event, although some students “did not con-
nect the book to 9/11 while reading, McCann provided the audience
with his thoughts on how the book thematically relates to the historic
event,” adding, however, that the reader always has the freedom to
read in their own way. “This book can be read as having nothing to
do with 9/11,” he said.18
In an interview for the university’s Chronicle, McCann made sev-
eral points about the event that sum up well the role of fiction in
the daily geography of readers. The interviewer opens by setting the
scene: “The freshman class read Let the Great World Spin before com-
ing to Duke—­” at which point McCann jumps in, making a joke at
his own expense, thereby shortening the relational distance that state-
ment could have implied between the author and a very large group
of readers obliged to read his novel: “My apologies to them!” He
then goes on to explain how pleased he was to have had his novel
selected—­“it’s a great honor”—­and to note that he appreciates the
fact that it has been a shared event: “I like the idea that it’s a collective
experience. I think it’s important at the start of the year so people can
get together who like or dislike a book and sort of argue about it, talk
about all the various issues that come up around the work.”19 And

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finally, he talks about the role of fiction in daily life, returning to his
theme of the novel as a doorstop to despair:

The title “Let the Great World Spin” comes from a Tennyson poem.
He was inspired by the Mu’allaqat . . . and in one of those poems it says,
“Is there any hope that this desolation can bring solace?” I think that’s
a really important line. Is there any hope that this terrible devastation,
desolation can bring us hope or solace? And I think there is. I think

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there’s a way for us to negotiate grief, I think there’s a way for us to
move on. I think it’s particularly important for your generation, to be
the first to remember it . . . I think it was defining in lots of ways, but I
don’t think that you guys should allow it to be the thing that surrounds
you completely. I think you have to understand it and you have to look
at it as a basis for negotiating the rest of your life, the grief, all those
sorts of emotions. To have been, what, five or six years old at the time,
you know that that will be remembered, but you don’t know why it’s
going to be remembered.20

McCann ends by arguing that this is what authors can offer their read-
ers: “So it’s the function of authors, poets, whether my generation or
your generation, to sort of make sense of what’s going on.” Given his
consistent emphasis, however, on reader agency and the space allowed
to the reader in which to make independent sense out of fiction, I take
it that he is here talking about a “making sense” that starts with the
author and the work—­a space that is offered—­and which ends with
the reader, in a collaboration, in the event of the novel, in a shared
process as author and reader work together “to sort of make sense of
what’s going on.”

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 Chapter 11

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Conclusion
What H appens Next?

D espite its title, this final chapter is more about anticipations than
conclusions. Rather than finishing with a roundup of what just hap-
pened, it asks instead, “What happens next?”—­for literary geography,
for The Great World, and for this book itself. The first area of anticipa-
tion is the geography of literary geographies. As someone who “does
literary geography” in the face of all the interdisciplinary difficulties
involved in sustaining a coherent idea of what literary geography actu-
ally is and might be, I ask this question from a personal standpoint.
The second area of anticipation has to do with The Great World: with
the first phase of promotion and reception now concluded, what
comes next, and what will be the effect of the 2013 publication of
McCann’s new novel TransAtlantic? The third and final “what hap-
pens next?” is applied to this study itself. Now that it’s written and in
your hands, what happens next?

What H appens Now for

Liter ary G eo gr aphies?
In the introduction to this book, I noted cautiously that it was being
offered to readers as an example of “one kind of interdisciplinary lit-
erary geography at work.” The point of that wary “one kind of” was
to acknowledge that literary geography has been and currently still
is defined in very different ways by different practitioners, in differ-
ent disciplines, and in different locations. As a result, even though
the physical geography of this book is relatively easy to determine,
its location in the academic space-­time of literary geography is much

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164 Literary Geographies

harder to establish. On the one hand, I know where this book was
written, where early drafts were read, where it was copyedited, where
it was indexed and published. I can also say confidently that the “one
kind of” literary geography practiced here is primarily related to UK-­
based theory and practice and that this study has emerged out my
continuing collaboration with UK-­based literary critics and cultural
geographers.1 The difficulties arise when I try to position this study in

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the wider space of studies in literature and geography, because such a
space has not been textually established.
Written and read works have, inhabit, and generate a geography
that happens not only in terms of the locations of their production and
reception but also in terms of their positionality in textual space. This
book was written in Japan, takes an American novel as its case study
text, and frames its argument by reference to work in cultural and lit-
erary geography primarily associated with the United Kingdom. This
geography of locations of production is rather complicated, especially
because cultural geography has conventionally been defined quite
differently in Japan from the ways in which it has been understood
and practiced in the English-­speaking (and particularly the United
Kingdom) tradition.2 But the academic spatiality of this book is even
more difficult to disentangle than its geographies of production, most
obviously because the range of work on literature and geography is
so broad and varied, so widely distributed, and so riven by gaps and
disconnections.

The Absent Atl as

So in order to engage with the first of my “what happens next?” ques-
tions, I’m going to think about the academic space of literary geog-
raphy, taking up again the idea of textual and literary space discussed
earlier in Chapter 8. I have a strongly personal motivation in attempt-
ing this discussion of the academic geography of literary geography,
one that derives from my own history of not noticing—­ tactically
blanking out in my published writing—­certain lines of work in the
study of literature and geography. I had always had a vague awareness
of the limitations of my view of the field of literary geography—­while
reassuring myself with the idea that a certain degree of insecurity was
inevitable in interdisciplinary studies—­ but this awareness became
intensified to an uncomfortable degree as I was working on the review
paper “Text as It Happens: Literary Geography” for Geography Com-
pass in 2008. My guilty sense that I was only reviewing a subset of the
available work is evident from the first line of the abstract, in which

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 Conclusion 165

I note with anxious precision that the article “reviews the current
situation in geographical work with fiction.” The idea of attempting
a comprehensive overview of studies in literature and geography was
incapacitatingly overwhelming, and I baulked. As a result, there are
some notable gaps in that review: Franco Moretti’s Atlas of the Euro-
pean Novel, for example, which at that point represented the definitive
work in literary geography for many nongeographers, is not men-

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tioned at all.
Paradoxically, the same 2008 paper ends with a call for wider read-
ing and citation and greater recognition across the breadth of work in
literary studies and geography:

Literary geography has the potential to develop as a collective field

energized by a sense of shared progress if scholars whose work engages
with the geographies of text are willing to recognize the ways in which
their own work is conditioned by context, to accept the validity of
other contextually conditioned approaches, and to write as well as read
across borders. Also critical will be the willingness of scholars working
in related fields to cite, present, and publish adventurously, thereby
locating their own work in multiple contexts, promoting cross-­border
thinking, and enabling the development of unprecedented but produc-
tive alliances and interactions. This will of necessity have to be a some-
what circular process: the collective audience for literary geography as
a whole will have to be generated in the process of being addressed.3

In the online discussion of this 2008 paper that took place the year
after it was published, this question of interdisciplinary recogni-
tion and citation came up several times. The paper was included in
the October 2009 Compass Interdisciplinary Virtual Conference
(“Breaking Down Barriers”), along with commentaries by UK geog-
raphers Michael Crang and James Kneale, and in his remarks Kneale
notes that “a scholar of the Moretti school would probably not agree
with Hones’ own reading of geography, or with the idea of the text-­
event as a spatial phenomenon.”4 But in my online responses to the
commentaries I blanked on the Moretti question again, making no
response, which prompted James to chase it up in a subsequent post:
“I wondered whether Sheila wanted to respond on this point about
Moretti—­I realise that her paper concentrates on geographers writing
about literature and literary theory, but given his importance, and
influence over some geographers, does he deserve a mention? And
what would it say?” Of course Moretti deserved a mention, but until

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166 Literary Geographies

this day James’s question remains hanging unanswered in that online

discussion.

“Must Try H arder”

This chapter, then, is my long-­delayed response to the questions raised
in that online discussion and the practical result of an admonition I

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have aimed at my own practice: “must try harder.”5 The argument I
want to make in this chapter—­creating a framework within which to
try harder—­is that one of the most important ways in which academic
space is produced is through texts and that as a result, we can grasp
the idea of academic space in much the same way that we understand
literary textual space: in other words, more specifically, I am arguing
that the geography of literary geography can be usefully understood
not only with regard to the literal location of scholars, projects, and
publications but also as a set of sociospatial practices that generate an
academic geography that is equally textual and material, is marked
by interrelations, intertextualities, gaps, and absences, and is always
under construction. My anticipatory hope is a response to my concern
that the academic space of studies in literature and geography is cur-
rently fragmented by its low levels of intertextuality; at the moment,
the spatial networks that together make up the broad field of stud-
ies in literature and geography tend to move forward separately, as if
inhabiting different academic dimensions. What I would like to antici-
pate is greater intertextual recognition.
In the current moment, as I write, studies in literature and geog-
raphy as a whole are neither generating nor (as a result) collaborating
in a coherently common academic space; this makes it very difficult to
understand the relative positions of thematically adjacent but relation-
ally distant work, because the production of multiple disconnected
spaces means that it is not easy to gain a coherent overview. It is true
that to some extent work on literature and geography can be sorted
into a geography of spatial differentiation by literal location: critical
literary geography, for example, is primarily UK based, whereas the
tradition of the distant reading initiated by Moretti’s Atlas of the Euro-
pean Novel 1800–­1900 can be traced from its beginnings in US-­based
comparative literature to the literary atlas project currently under way
at ETH Zurich. But academic work locates itself in space-­time not only
in terms of where, literally, it is produced (and read) but also in terms
of the ways in which it writes its textual surroundings, generating the
space in which it takes its position, and this is much more difficult to
envision. However, once the idea of textual literary space is applied

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 Conclusion 167

to the geography of literary geography—­so that it can be grasped as

a real (textual/material) space produced through writing, publishing,
and reading—­it should become possible to apply spatial theory to the
field itself in order to deal with the problem of its disconnected geog-
raphy: its gaps, lapses, juxtapositions, and general unruliness. Within
this spatiality, the practices through which geographies are shaped are
as much a social production as the result of any natural borders or

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institutional locations, and as a result an attempt can be made to write
into existence a space of spaces for literary geography.
References, name checks, and citations produce academic space-­
time, because—­as David Coughlan argues, in his discussion of the
social space of text—­“we may be absent from the space of the book,
removed from its physical presence, and yet already on the threshold
of the space of the text, moving into its sphere of influence.”6 Refer-
ences and citations in academic space have this “threshold” effect just
as literature reviews and narratives of academic lineage and progress
perform space by processes of selective recognition, by inclusion and
exclusion. The chapter on literary geography in the Routledge New
Critical Idiom volume on Spatiality shows how this works: with the
chapter organized into topics (“the spirit of place,” “the perambula-
tions of the flaneur,” and so on) and with almost no reference to work
by literary geographers, the overview constructs a space of themes
almost entirely absent of current practitioners. Although the work of
Franco Moretti is discussed in the final two sections and the related
work of Barbara Piatti and the ETH Zurich team on the literary atlas
of Europe is mentioned in the chapter’s introduction, everything else
is covered in one sentence: “Literary geography is also a field of study,
and there are a number of scholars actively engaged in it.”7 In this
way, the chapter writes into being a very tightly delineated textual
space in which the Moretti-­Piatti line of work in literary geography is
visibly present, while everything else is invisibly distant. The introduc-
tion to literary geography presented in Spatiality thus shows how, in
practice, the space-­time of literary geography looks completely dif-
ferent depending on where one is standing: although the intertextual
can indeed be understood in principle to make up “the whole of [the]
space,” the result of academic spacing practices is that the whole is
never wholly visible. This is both entirely inevitable—­it would be
impossible to cite every relevant work—­and deeply frustrating. In a
wide-­ranging interdisciplinary field such as literary geography (lacking,
as it currently does, a coherent overview narrative), contextualization
and citation practices continue to produce incommensurable packets
of academic space-­time.

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168 Literary Geographies

Ac ademic S pac e-­T ime

Writing of the apparent ineluctability of globalization, Doreen Massey
has described the rhetorical process that “turns geography into his-
tory, space into time”:8

It says that Moçambique and Nicaragua are not really different from
“us.” We are not to imagine them as having their own trajectories, their

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own particular histories, and the potential for their own, perhaps differ-
ent, futures. They are not recognised as coeval others. They are merely
at an earlier stage in the one and only narrative it is possible to tell.
That cosmology of “only one narrative” obliterates the multiplicities,
the contemporaneous heterogeneities of space. It reduces simultaneous
coexistence to place in the historical queue.

Here Massey is making the point that contemporary lives, lived

variously, are all too frequently understood to hold positions not only
in space but also in time—­a view that locates some ways of living
somehow stuck in the past or still developing, catching up. Instead,
she argues, all ways of living in the present moment must be of course
contemporaneous. Space, in this sense, is made up of a multiplicity of
stories-­so-­far. As I think about the geographies of literary geography
within which I am trying to locate this book, I want to note that I
choose to understand the academic space of literary geography in the
same way. In other words, in what follows, I am not arguing that
some approaches to the study of literature and geography are more
advanced than others, that some are behind the wave and need to
“catch up” while others are providing a leading edge; rather, I am
proposing that what matters, and what I should aim to achieve myself,
is the recognition of simultaneous multiplicity in order that the full
range of work on literature and geography could become more mutu-
ally visible and collaboration more possible.
My reluctance to venture beyond the space I’d marked out for
coverage in the 2008 review essay—­ my dodging of the Moretti
problem—­derived from the fact that I could not see how to reconcile
his version of literary geography with the kind of literary geogra-
phy that had developed in English-­language cultural geography. I
couldn’t find terms in which to write about both as simultaneously
valid, even though I believed they both must be. Doreen Massey, as
noted earlier, suggests that we can imagine space “as a simultaneity
of stories-­so-­far.” One of the key points about the academic space of
work on literature and geography is that several of the major story

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 Conclusion 169

lines have existed simultaneously but quite independently. For many

nonspecialists, the idea of literary geography became so strongly asso-
ciated with Moretti’s widely read 1998 Atlas of the European Novel,
and the work loomed so large, that it obscured everything else exist-
ing in the field at the time. The problem I had in including the Atlas
in my 2008 review was that the one term, literary geography, was
being used to describe two different sets of practices grounded in two

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different disciplines, and, even more confusingly, the Moretti version
wrote a space for itself that depended for its force on the complete
absence of work in cultural geography. Having introduced in the first
section (“Towards a Geography of Literature”) the “very simple idea”
that “geography is not an inert container, is not a box where cultural
history ‘happens,’ but an active force,” Moretti went on in the next
chapter to define the literary geography toward which he was moving
in very specific terms: “This is what literary geography is all about:
you select a textual feature . . . find the data, put them on paper—­and
then you look at the map.”
Moretti’s “very simple idea” that geography was not a box was of
course common sense for many cultural geographers at the time, even
if the concept of “geography” as a monolithic “active force” would
probably have seemed to many geographers to be veering toward
environmental determinism. Furthermore, at the time the Atlas was
published, human geography had a longstanding tradition of liter-
ary geography that covered a great deal more than the selection and
mapping of textual features. So the reaction from geographers to this
presentation of the field by a comparative literature specialist was, not
surprisingly, skeptical. The 1999 review of the Atlas in Progress in
Human Geography notes that “literature on literature from the dis-
cipline of geography is ignored throughout the book,” concluding
with the prediction that “the wide circulation of this particular book
may not do the geographic any favours.” David Harvey was equally
unsympathetic in his 2001 essay “The Cartographic Imagination,”
remarking that Moretti “reduces spatiality and geography to simplistic
mapping.”9 So in writing the 2008 review, and then again in partici-
pating in the 2009 conference discussion, my failure to acknowledge
the Atlas sprang from the difficulty of integrating into my narrative
of literary geography a work from 1998 that wrote into existence an
academic space dependent on the invisibility of the tradition I was
describing, the tradition within which I was myself working.
This difficulty represents a kind of self-­perpetuating and potentially
always-­widening relational distance in academic space. Moretti, in
his literary geography, made no reference to work by geographers;

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170 Literary Geographies

my task was to review literary geography specifically as it had been

produced by geographers. As a result, I was baffled by the question
of how to locate the Atlas in the academic space I was performing
in references and citations. Quotation and allusion is basic to liter-
ary intertextual space, and in the same way, references and citation
practices are, will be, or could be fundamental to the creation of a
sociotextual-­material academic space for literary geography. The point

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is not only what gets cited but also how it gets cited: how citations and
references, gaps and absences perform the space of studies in litera-
ture and geography. Take, for example, the September 2013 revision
to Marie-­Laure Ryan’s entry on “Space” in The Living Handbook, in
which a concluding section on “recent trends” refers to two lines of
work in literary-­geographical studies: first, mapping projects in the
tradition of Moretti’s Atlas and second, Westphal’s version of geocriti-
cism. Given that these forms of literary geography are compatible with
the container/grid view of space on which Ryan’s definitions of nar-
rative space depends, this narrow set of references is understandable.
However, the absence of references to other lines of work on literary
geography that engage directly (but very differently) with questions
of narrative space means that the “recent trends” section reinforces
by exclusion the definition of space assumed by the entry as a whole.
While the frustration of geographers reacting to the Atlas came out
of a sense that it was written as if several decades of cultural geography
had never happened, what I wanted to be able to do in the 2008 paper
(but at the time could not) was construct an academic space-­time in
which I could recognize the Moretti version of literary geography as a
“coeval other,” without trying to hail it into the space-­time of cultural
geography—­a maneuver that could well have ended up appearing to
locate it “at an earlier stage in the one and only narrative it is possible
to tell.”10 In order to reconcile the space within which Moretti’s liter-
ary geography was able to happen with the space within which I was
working, I needed a different way of imagining space itself—­I needed,
in fact, an academic version of Massey’s political space-­time of loose
ends and open-­endedness, of heterogeneity characterized by “an urge
toward ‘outwardlookingness,’ towards a positivity and an aliveness to
the world beyond one’s own turf . . . a commitment to that radical
contemporaneity which is the condition of, and condition for, spatial-
ity.”11 Such a view of space would surely enable me to stop dodging
the problem of incompatible textual spaces and instead figure out
how literary geography as an academic space of spaces—­of multiple
texts and practices—­might cope with the “radical contemporaneity of

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 Conclusion 171

an ongoing multiplicity of others,” in which academics, like politics,

could be about the “ever-­contested question of our being-­together.”12

Te x tual S pac e, S patial Texts

The knotty problem of “being together” in interdisciplinary literary
geography was again highlighted a few years after the publication of

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Moretti’s Atlas, paradoxically enough as the result of an interdisci-
plinary literary-­geographical collaboration: the collection of papers
presented in the “Textual Spaces, Spatial Texts” session of the 2004
RGS-­IBG conference and subsequently published in New Formations
the following year, which included contributions from literary critics
as well as geographers. To some extent, the conference session and
subsequent publication produced a textual space for literary geogra-
phy within which different lines of work could coexist; the influential
paper by the literary critic Andrew Thacker, however, had something
of a Moretti effect in its writing into existence of a new textual space
for literary geography because it proposed the establishment of a
“critical literary geography” that would be based on the practice of
“reading and interpreting literary texts by reference to geographical
concepts.”13 “What would such a ‘critical literary geography’ look like
in practice?” Thacker asked, thereby cutting this new critical literary
geography off from the space of cultural geography’s literary geogra-
phy, in which this kind of practice had been initiated by Marc Bros-
seau’s call ten years earlier, in his 1994 review article for Progress in
Human Geography, for more attention to be paid to details of the
literary text in closer and more critical readings of literary material.
The disconcerting disconnections separating the appearance
of Moretti’s Atlas-­style literary geography in 1998 and Thacker’s
critical literary geography in 2005 from Brosseau’s 1994 review of
work in geographical literary geography can, however, be resolved
in the conceptualization of an unruly, multicentered, and multinet-
worked academic space-­time for literary geography that allows for the
simultaneous existence of unrelated trajectories but encourages the
recognition of the coeval other. Nevertheless, this is an interdisciplin-
ary space-­time that is very difficult to establish. As Donald Rumsfeld
famously once put it in the context of international relations: “There
are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There
are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now
know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns—­there
are things we do not know we don’t know.”14 Similarly, in the spac-
ing performed by texts in interdisciplinary studies in literature and

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172 Literary Geographies

geography, we have the cited present, the uncited absent, and the
simply unknown.
My guilty evasion of bafflingly “other” literary geographical
spaces—­my textual production of the unremarked absent—­has until
recently included not only Atlas-­style distant reading literary geogra-
phies and literary cartographies of the kind practiced in the current
ETH Zurich project but also various lines of work in literary stud-

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ies such as ecopoetics, geopoetics, ecocriticism, and geocriticism. The
difficulty I have in reconciling these various sets of practices with the
version of literary geography I practice myself again results from the
ways in which these other literary-­geographical spaces and the space
within which I have work maintain mutual textual distance. This is a
distance I have myself tacitly enabled by my failure to work out how
I could reconcile different textually produced worlds in a space of
spaces: the biggest distance-­producing problem remains the absence
of intertextual acknowledgment and reference.
In order to grasp the extent of this problem, it may be useful to
return at this point to Chapter 7’s discussion of China Miéville’s novel
The City and the City. As noted in that chapter, Miéville’s fictional
setting provides a model for envisioning the multiple possibilities
of intertextual space. In Chapter 7, this model was used as a way
of envisioning the multiplicity of the coexisting New Yorks, which
haunt The Great World. Here the same model can be used to envi-
sion the multiplicity of the space of contemporary studies in literature
and geography. The fictional setting for Miéville’s novel is (only) a
double space: its two cities are coterminous, occupying exactly the
same geographical location, but perceived by their inhabitants to be
almost entirely separate. It is a crime to breach from one to the other,
and their copresence can only be seen from a metageographical per-
spective. My idea here is that it requires a similarly metageographical
perspective to grasp the copresence of the multiple literary geogra-
phies that at present occupy the same location (“literary-­geographical
studies”) despite the way the spatial practices of the inhabitants of
the different academic cities produce these spaces as almost entirely
discrete. Practices of reference and citation perform space in the same
way that the inhabitants of Miéville’s two cities perform space: by not
noticing, as much as by noticing.

G eo c r itic ism
This “not noticing” is performed in various ways. Having already
confessed to my own history of not noticing, I will offer in evidence

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 Conclusion 173

here as an example of my known unknowns (the guiltily uncited) the

recently established domain of geocriticism. The difficulty I have in
reconciling geocriticism with literary geography—­despite their evident
compatibility in many regards—­derives from the way in which geo-
criticism has been written into English-­language academic space as a
new territory, which in turn derives to some extent from its close links
with the French-­language tradition of géocritique. Work on literary

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geography that locates itself within the tradition of English-­language
cultural geography typically contextualizes its argument within a tra-
dition stretching back at least as far as the 1940s, and new work is
presented as a contribution to an existing body of scholarship: Ang-
harad Saunders, for example, begins a recent paper with this kind of
contextualization, writing that “in recent years there has been a grow-
ing awareness within the field of literary geography that a text is not
just a finished product awaiting interpretation, but is equally a set of
spatial practices that combine in different ways to bring the text into
being.”15 In this formulation, literary geography is an established field
within which change and progress—­here “a growing awareness”—­
can be traced and on the basis of which new work is constructed.
In contrast, work on literary spatiality that locates itself as part of
English-­language geocriticism typically takes the position that it rep-
resents a new initiative. In terms of the production of academic space-­
time, these two frameworks are difficult to reconcile.
Some disconnections in English-­language work on literature and
geography can in this way be traced back to the transposition of work
from one linguistic tradition to another—­Westphal’s La géocritique:
Réel, fiction, espace was published in an English translation in 2011—­
and to a certain extent the problematic gaps in English-­language work
on literature and geography have to be attributed to the even more
problematic dominance of English as a language of scholarly interac-
tion.16 Once work produced in another language is translated into
English, then English-­language scholars unable to access the original
will tend to (re)locate it within the context of more familiar English-­
language practice, with apparently slippages in academic space-­time
inevitably opening up as a result. The ETH Zurich mapping project,
for example, follows the Moretti line in its emphasis on the mapping of
literary settings: the English version of its project website summarizes
the approach under the heading “Towards a Geography of Fiction”:
“It all starts with the supposedly simple questions: Where is literature
set and why there? Europe offers an abundant wealth of fictionalised
landscapes and cities. The nascent research area of literary geography
/ literary cartography aims at visibly rendering such complex overlays

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174 Literary Geographies

of real and fictional geographies.” In this configuration of textual

space, the story-­so-­far is that literary geography is a field of research
still in the process of being established in a collaboration involving
literary studies and cartography. The position taken by the project
website is that “the rather vaguely defined field of literary geography”
can only “actually take shape” through “constant mutual exchange
and adjustments between literary theory and cartographic practice.”

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In an English-­language context, the definition of literary geography as
an interdisciplinary collaboration between literary studies and cartog-
raphy seems limited, a point acknowledged by the website, perhaps,
in the immediate addition of the reference “see also Hones 2008.” It
is important to remember, however, that the English-­language pages
of the project’s website offer restricted access into a project conceived
and presented primarily, it seems, in German, and in that sense the
English pages work in two directions: not only implicitly locating
the project in the context of English-­ language literary geography
but also drawing the reader into the German-­language textual space
of Literaturkartographie. In the original German-­language context,
Literaturkartographie—­perhaps confusingly translated on occasion as
“literary geography”—­no doubt really is a “nascent research area.”
In the case of English-­language geocriticism, however, the issue
of translation between textual spaces is less of an issue. Westphal’s
translator, Robert T. Tally Jr., has explained that he was already using
the term geocriticism in the early 1990s, before becoming aware of
Westphal’s work: “I started to use the term geocriticism to refer to
an aspect of my research project through which I hoped to bring a
greater emphasis to space, place and mapping in literary studies.”17
Tally expects that “as more scholars and critics explore the spaces,
places, and mappings of literature, geocritical practices and readings
will multiply.” But he also notes that even before he started using
the English-­language version of the term geocriticism in print (around
2008) “a large number of scholars, critics, and theorists had been
producing works that might be considered geocritical.”18 This “might
be considered” plays an important role in the textual production of
the academic space of geocriticism, as it enables the recuperation of
work in cultural and literary geography from before 2008 as geocriti-
cal in all but name. Similarly, it seems that in translating the title of
Westphal’s La géocritique, Tally and Westphal considered “a more ten-
tative title” as a way of registering that there may be “other, perhaps
even opposed, versions of geocriticism out there.”19 It is in the terra
incognita of the academic space “out there” beyond the borders of
Westphal and Tally’s geocriticisms that the space of literary geography

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 Conclusion 175

can be found. As a result, in this spatial configuration, the whole tradi-

tion of literary geography since the early twentieth century “might be
considered geocritical” in retrospect, so the question of whether that
work is geocriticism or literary geography appears to be a matter not
just of academic borders but also of academic history, which is to say,
it has to do with academic space-­time.
The English-­language version of geocriticism seems to me to have

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been positioned as simultaneously adjacent to and yet distanced from
work in literary geography, and this is part of the reason it is so hard to
reconcile the two. While Westphal’s géocritique seems to be primarily
a mode of literary criticism, Tally has explained that the English-­
language version of geocriticism, or “spatial critical theory,” has a
broader range, dealing with the “poetics and production of space,
along with the spatial analytics of power and the examination of gen-
der and spatiality,” as well as “spatial philosophy and criticism.” In
their textbook Cultural Geographies: An Introduction, John Horton
and Peter Kraftl meanwhile explain that cultural geography “presents
us with a rich body of research and evidence-­based theory about geog-
raphies of cultural practices and politics in diverse contexts,” while
also offering “a major resource of concepts and in-­depth research
exploring the geographical importance of cultural materials, media,
texts and representations in particular contexts.”20 The prospectus for
geocriticism that Tally presents in Spatiality comes so close to Horton
and Kraftl’s definition of the practice of cultural geography that the
two seem to me almost to constitute an academic version of Miéville’s
two cities. The distinction is produced almost entirely as a relational
distance generated by reference and citation practices: to be specific,
by the absence of mutual recognition.

S i m u lta neity in Ac ademic S pace-­T i me

Eric Prieto’s 2013 Literature, Geography, and the Postmodern Poet-
ics of Place is another recent work taking inspiration from Westphal’s
géocritique, but in this case, the relational distance separating work in
literary studies and spatial theory from a literary geography grounded
in UK-­oriented practice in cultural geography has to do with the pres-
ence, not the absence, of citation. Framing his argument by reference
to work in human geography from the 1970s and 1980s, Prieto per-
forms an academic spatiality that suggests that everything needed for
the textual space of literary geography is, in a sense, on the surface—­
everything is all here, now, waiting to be discovered and developed:
literary texts, literary studies, narratology, narrative theory, cultural

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176 Literary Geographies

geography, and cartography. This is a view of academic space as a flat

surface of simultaneous multiplicity, an infinite library of work, all cur-
rently accessible. And it is this view of academic spatiality that enables
the coexistence of different speeds, or rhythms, in the space-­time of
literary geography, so that interdisciplinary work may seem both new
and yet somehow behind the curve, because in interdisciplinary aca-
demic practice the question is always, whose curve?

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Because the most useful and relevant work in human geography for
Prieto’s purposes was produced between 1970 and the mid-­1990s,
the academic space-­time he produces by reference and citation is a
surface of simultaneous multiplicity. Prieto inhabits the dimension
of an always-­contemporary academic space, using the present tense
in writing of humanistic geography in order to render it current,
although the bibliography includes only two geographical works pub-
lished later than 1996:

The new generation of humanist geographers, however, has been less

concerned, however, with documenting specific regions and explain-
ing differences between them than with exploring the subjective experi-
ence of place as an object of study in its own right, with place typically
understood to be a “universal and transhistorical part of the human
condition” (Cresswell, 20). Their project seems to be more existential
than anthropological. This approach to the study of place has recently
begun to attract attention in philosophical quarters, notably in the work
of Edward Casey and Jeff Malpas . . . It has also begun to have influence
in related fields like architecture and environmental planning.21 (italics
added)

This passage performs an academic space of literary geography that is

contemporary and active, despite the fact that the Casey and Malpas
works cited were published almost twenty years ago. And although
the quotation from Cresswell is placed inside Prieto’s discussion of a
“new generation of humanistic geographers,” Cresswell in the origi-
nal writes in the past tense: “Place was seen as a universal and transh-
istorical part of the human condition. It was not so much places (in
the world) that interested the humanists but ‘place’ as an idea, concept
and way of being-­in-­the-­world.”22
The way in which Prieto writes humanistic geography into a con-
temporary moment in academic space-­time becomes even more clear
when compared with Horton and Kraftl’s Cultural Geographies (also
published in 2013), in which humanistic geography’s approach to
place is described in the past tense: “During the 1970s, humanist

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 Conclusion 177

geographers tried to explore what it is about places that make us love or

hate them.”23 They remark that “humanist-­inspired geographers like
Tuan (1977) drew upon literary texts for their powerful, often poetic
invocations of particular landscapes.”24 Similarly, Joanne Sharp, in her
entry on humanistic geography for the 2009 Dictionary of Human
Geography, noted that “although many of its arguments are still key to
current debates” in human geography, “the influence of humanistic

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geography per se has waned since the 1980s.”25
There are clear advantages to the performance of an academic space
in which everything is contemporary and present; however, once the
dimension of time is added, then it becomes possible to envision a
space-­time for literary geography that is not only a surface of simul-
taneously present texts and arguments but also a dynamic dimension
in which a vast range of relevant material is indeed simultaneously
present but nonetheless representative of particular moments in disci-
plinary stories-­so-­far. Significantly, although the title of Prieto’s book
is Literature, Geography, and the Postmodern Poetics of Place, there is no
entry in the index for literary geography. Cultural geography has one
entry, while humanist geography has six main entries and four subcat-
egories, which together make up another six entries. This implies that
the academic space of Prieto’s frame of reference includes humanistic
geography but not cultural or literary geography, an implication sup-
ported by his argument that geocriticism is the interdisciplinary field
linking geography and literary studies: “By asking geographical ques-
tions of literary texts and asking literary questions of geographical
representations, geocriticism brings together in a productive way the
social sciences and the humanities.”26
This brings us back to the question of language: it is significant that
the bibliography for Prieto’s Literature, Geography, and the Postmod-
ern Poetics of Place includes no standard works in literary geography
except Marc Brosseau’s 1996 Des roman géographes. The inclusion of
Brosseau’s French-­language work but not his English-­language arti-
cles, which have been critical to the development of English-­language
literary geography, is no doubt again related to the relational dis-
tances separating French-­and English-­language work on literature
and geography. The fact that Prieto works in French and comparative
literature, for example, probably also explains the fact that Westphal’s
2007 La géocritique: Réel, fiction, espace, along with its English trans-
lation by Robert Tally, is prominently cited in the first endnote as an
“important contribution to the spatial study of literature,” as is Tally’s
subsequent collection Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Map-
ping in Literary and Cultural Studies, while the contribution to the

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178 Literary Geographies

spatial study of literature made by literary geographers is off the map.

And this in turn may partly be explained by the fact that Tally’s ver-
sion of geocriticism similarly derives from a French-­language source
and rarely mentions work by English-­language cultural geographers
or literary critics working in critical literary geography.

Co l l abo r atio n

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This problem of disconnection within the broad spectrum of work on
literature and geography obviously makes collaboration less likely. But
perhaps it is worthwhile bearing in mind the idea that collaboration
does not have to imply agreement or consensus: the event of fiction,
for example, does not depend on an author-­reader consensus. Not all
readings are sympathetic, even though all readings are to some extent
collaborative. Texts clearly do happen in encounters with resisting
readers, unsympathetic readers, and critical critics, and the resisting,
misreading, or even outraged reader can easily be recognized as a sig-
nificant participant in the text event—­reading “against the grain,” for
example, standing as an accepted practice in literary criticism.27
Collaboration in literary geography can therefore also be under-
stood to include the mutual engagement of scholars who do things
differently, approach the study of literature and space from different
directions, proceed according to contrasting assumptions, use com-
peting theories, and define literary geography in incompatible ways.
It seems to me that what matters most in the near future for work on
literature and geography, what needs to happen next, is not consensus
but recognition; it would surely be more productive to practice dif-
ferent approaches to literary geography within a framework of mutual
acknowledgment than to ignore parallel lines of work, even if that
acknowledgment involves the acknowledgment and exploration of
incompatibility.
If we return briefly here to the idea that this particular experiment
in literary geography, this discussion of literary geography and The
Great World, is as much a collaborative project as McCann’s novel and
Petit’s walk, we might be able to see how all three emerge out of an
engagement with others that can be agonistic as well as sympathetic.
McCann’s novel is, as he makes clear, a response to the public swirl-
ing of despair and disagreement surrounding the 9/11 attacks and
an intervention into the ways in which those attacks were understood
and being carried forward in spatial and memorial practices. McCann
has said that in writing the novel he wanted to create “a new space
in which to breathe” for his readers, to emphasize “the possibility,

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 Conclusion 179

or desire, to create a piece of art that talks to the human instinct for
recovery and joy” in the face of debilitating anger and grief.28 In this
sense, he was consciously working against the grain of a surround-
ing public discourse—­not denying or rejecting it but recognizing and
responding to it. Perhaps it would be pushing things too far to draw
a parallel here with the way in which Philippe Petit also worked with
and against the contributions of the police and the judiciary to the

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event of his wirewalk, but still, it’s clear that in his determination to
carry his project through in such a successfully notorious fashion he
was able to use the people who thought his project wrongheaded and
who distanced themselves from it, as well as the security systems in
place to prevent it. Perhaps we have a clue here as to how we can see
the unconvinced, the critical, and the disapproving providing moti-
vation and even, as a result, a form of collaboration, thus finding a
model for progress in studies in literature and geography that takes
mutual recognition as the important first step and then moves from
that recognition toward some form of collaboration based on the
acknowledgment of difference.

Wh at Ha p pens Now f o r The Great World ?

What happens now with the geography of The Great World? With the
first phase of promotion and reception now concluded, what comes
next? Of course, the event of this novel is still actively in progress: it’s
still attracting new readers, more and more translations are appearing,
and early readers are returning to the novel and reading it again. A
reader’s review posted August 10, 2013, by Bonnie Ludlow on the
Amazon​.com website, for example, comments, “Read this book twice
in preparation for a book club discussion: enjoyed it even more the
2nd time around.” But while the event of The Great World continues
along in this way, the publication in May 2013 of McCann’s new
novel TransAtlantic has added a new dimension and a new set of
relations to its geography, and this is a big part of the “what happens
next” for McCann and The Great World.
With the publication of TransAtlantic, the two novels are now
forming an inextricably mixed intertextual event, with the increased
mass of the two together also starting to pull earlier and less well-­
known works into the combined text event. The critical mass factor
inevitably forms a part of the marketing strategy for TransAtlantic
and for McCann’s work as a whole. The introduction to the new
novel on McCann’s official website makes this intertextual approach
to promotion explicit: “In the National Book Award–­winning Let the

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180 Literary Geographies

Great World Spin, Colum McCann thrilled readers with a marvelous

high-­wire act of fiction that The New York Times Book Review called
‘an emotional tour de force.’ Now McCann demonstrates once again
why he is one of the most acclaimed and essential authors of his gen-
eration with a soaring novel that spans continents, leaps centuries, and
unites a cast of deftly rendered characters, both real and imagined.”29
Not only publishers but also reviewers and readers now tend to

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take the two novels together, reading one in light of the other, seeing
parallels in theme and style: readers will probably notice, for example,
that a key intertextual allusion from The Great World—­“whosoever
brought me here is going to have to take me home”—­resurfaces in
TransAtlantic. Some readers will delight in having another McCann
novel to read, while others will come to the follow-­up novel with high
expectations and leave it feeling let down. An Amazon​.com reader’s
review of the earlier novel, The Great World, shows how the positive
knock-­on effect works: McCann “weaves several tales into one fantas-
tic book,” pattipie enthuses in a comment posted on August 3, 2013,
“and I have ordered his most recent, TransAtlantic. Looking forward
to another excellent read.”
An interview with McCann on the occasion of the publication of
TransAtlantic, published in the online version of the Guardian news-
paper on May 25, 2013, has a set of below-­the-­line reader comments
that do not, in fact, refer to the new novel at all; the discussion between
commenters is all about earlier work.30 One reader, AggieH, remarks
that having somewhat reluctantly read Dancer—­finding it “surprising,
subtly sneaky [and] engrossing”—­she is now ready to read The Great
World, paradoxically because it sounds “as uninteresting as Dancer.”
The commenter’s point is that she has reached the point where she
“will read a book I don’t want to read because it’s by McCann.”
Other readers jump in with encouragement. PatCake responds, “Let
me be the first to encourage you to dive right into Let the Great World
Spin. It’s a remarkable novel.” “Absolutely agree,” says villagebook-
worm. “You may well find yourself reading one of the best books you
will ever pick up. I was expecting nothing much and was wary of the
‘prize-­winning’ reputation—­I found one of my favourites.”
While none of the below-­ the-­
line comments mention the new
novel, the occasion for the exchange was provided precisely by that
publication. In this way, McCann’s continuing productivity and
media presence work to sustain interest in his most famous novel,
The Great World, while also attracting readers to his earlier, less well-­
known works, such as Dancer and Zoli. Nevertheless, the expectations
set up by The Great World sometimes lead to disappointment and

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 Conclusion 181

less enthusiastic readings of earlier and later works. Current reader

reviews of TransAtlantic on the Amazon​.com website include the
whole range from five-­star to one-­star responses. The currently lead-
ing five-­star reader review, posted by Betsey Van Horn on April 8,
2013, makes a positive comparison: “As in Let the Great World Spin,
McCann’s new novel begins with a real event in the air, and uses the
opening narrative as a camera lens, tilting this way and that and keep-

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ing us off balance while images assemble to create a defining scene.”
Another five-­star review, posted by Bonnie Brodie on April 6, 2013,
also relies on comparison: “TransAtlantic, by Colum McCann, is a
breathtaking book . . . The story, as in other of McCann’s novels such
as Let the Great World Spin, is about connections, repetitions, and
how the past foretells the future and the future is the scribe for the
past.” Toward the other end of the scale, a two-­star review posted by
Helen S. Shlein on August 6, 2013, also reads TransAtlantic in the
context of its predecessor but reaches a very different conclusion: “I
truly loved this writer’s previous book, As the Great World Spins, but
I was disappointed in this one, which I found quite dull and boring.”
Another reviewer, Windsofnirvana, reading TransAtlantic after enjoy-
ing The Great World, was so disappointed that the new book only gets
one star: “Having read Let the Great World Spin I was excited to pick
up this novel,” the comments begin, but the reader’s disappointment
quickly becomes evident. Despite the fact that the novel “was getting
great press and somehow got long listed for the Man Booker,” for
this reader it was a complete failure. This review, from July 29, 2013,
suggests that while McCann’s increasingly high profile is making him
a must-­read writer for some people, for others it works the other way
around: “This is an example of a writer who has the ability to write, a
growing reputation, and a deadline that needs to be filled. Far from
this author’s best work.”
So far at least, positive responses to TransAtlantic are outweigh-
ing those posted by disappointed readers by a considerable margin. It
seems that McCann has achieved another successful connection with
his readers. The reader review posted by RedBirdFlies on the online
Guardian book pages website on August 3, 2013, indeed emphasizes
the “addictive effect” of McCann’s writing. Comparing his style to
that of Cormac McCarthy, the reviewer concludes with the remark
that “if they were musicians, they would both be permanently on my
playlist.” In this way, with the publication of TransAtlantic, The Great
World has become renewed and recontextualized; readers now can go
from one novel to the other and back again, letting the two merge and

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182 Literary Geographies

inform each other while yet remaining distinct. For The Great World,
there is a great deal of “what happens next” left to come.

Wh at H a ppens Now in Our Text Event?

“Once upon a time and long ago, in fact so long ago that I couldn’t
have been there, and if I had been there, I could not be here,” I

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started writing this last section. Now you are reading it in the here
of your own time and place. If you’ve made it this far, to the conclu-
sion, then you must already have traveled with me through the whole
book—­unless you skipped to the end—­and so we have come to these
last few pages together.
While you are reading this conclusion, I think I am still somehow
present, some part of me, merged together with a lot of other people—­
the scholars and authors whose work made this project possible and
the friends and colleagues who read earlier drafts. At this moment,
which is here and now but also there and once upon a time, I have
nearly finished writing this revised version for English publication.
The earlier version is already out of my hands and happening beyond
my reach; here in Tokyo, my collaborator Eimi Ozawa is already at
work on the translation, and our editor Kensuke Goto has begun the
publication process. Now this revised version is nearly finished, ready
to be sent to Palgrave Macmillan in New York. And by the time you
read this, all of us on the production side will have finished our con-
tributions to the first stage of the event. Even as I write, the distances
involved in our text event must be expanding and the interactions
becoming more complicated. No doubt the book will happen differ-
ently for different readers, and one variety of the many distances will
be those resulting from disconnections between what I tried to say or
thought I wrote and how my words are subsequently read, translated,
edited, and read again. All these things—­inference, interpretation,
recontextualization, resistant reading, and misreading—­may happen,
but who am I, anyway, to decide that a reading is a misreading?
In this text event, what happens now is up to you.

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 Notes

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C hapter 1
1. This description is based on a range of sources, including Ric Burns,
dir., American Experience: New York: The Center of the World. PBS,
2003; Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin: A Novel (New York:
Random House, 2009); Philippe Petit, To Reach the Clouds (New York:
Skyhorse, 2008).
2. Petit, To Reach the Clouds, 4–­5.
3. See, for example, James Glanz and Eric Lipton, City in the Sky: The Rise
and Fall of the World Trade Center (New York: Times Books, 2003).
4. I am using the term interdisciplinary here, rather than multidisciplinary
or transdiciplinary, only because I find it less misleading than the alter-
natives, and I am reluctant to add yet another term to the range of pos-
sibilities. At present, because disciplinary divisions in literary geography
remain quite significant, it seems to me that the field remains interdis-
ciplinary in the sense that it usually depends on theory and techniques
from one field being applied to work in another field. This works in
both directions, of course, so the interdisciplinarity is often multilateral
and collaborative. In some cases, work in literary geography might be
termed multidisciplinary in the sense that different disciplines are work-
ing together on one question without interdisciplinary integration hav-
ing been realized.
5. Colum McCann, “Walking an Inch off the Ground,” in Let the Great
World Spin: A Novel, 357–­60.
6. Ibid., 360.
7. Colum McCann, “Let the Great World Spin Q&A,” accessed May 10,
2014, http://​www​.colummccann​.com.
8. McCann, The Great World, 23, 252.
9. Colum McCann and Nathan Englander, “A Conversation with Colum
McCann and Nathan Englander,” in Let the Great World Spin: A Novel
(New York: Random House, 2009), 361–­71.
10. Ibid., 363.
11. McCann, “Q&A.”
12. Sheila Hones, “Literary Geography: The Novel as a Spatial Event,” in
Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds: Geography and the Humanities,

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184 Notes

ed. Stephen Daniels, et al. (London: Routledge, 2011), 247–­55; Sheila

Hones, “Text as It Happens: Literary Geography,” Geography Compass
2, no. 5 (2008): 1301–­17.
13. The quotation is taken from Doreen Massey’s writings on space in gen-
eral, in For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 9.
14. I began working with the case study text, Let the Great World Spin, after
Michele Acuto invited me to write a chapter on “the literary dimension”
for the collection Global City Challenges: Debating a Concept, Improv-

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ing the Practice, eds. Michele Acuto and Wendy Steele (London: Pal-
grave Macmillan, 2013), 101–­16.
15. There is an abundance of material detailing the historiography and cur-
rent state of modern literary geography dating from the early 1980s.
The “overviews and review articles” page of the bibliography website
http://​ literarygeographies​.wordpress​ .com/ provides a reading list
of more than thirty items. Useful overviews include Sheila Hones,
“Humanistic Geography and Literary Text: Problems and Possibilities,”
Keisen Jogakuen College Bulletin 4 (1992): 25–­ 49; Marc Brosseau,
“Geography’s Literature,” Progress in Human Geography 18, no. 3
(1994): 333–­53; Sara Blair, “Cultural Geography and the Place of the
Literary,” American Literary History 10, no. 3 (1998): 544–­67; Joanne
P. Sharp, “Towards a Critical Analysis of Fictive Geographies,” Area 32,
no. 3 (2000): 327–­34; Andrew Thacker, “The Idea of a Critical Liter-
ary Geography,” New Formations 57 (2005–­6): 56–­73; Hones, “Text
as It Happens,” 1301–­17; Angharad Saunders, “Literary Geography:
Reforging the Connections,” Progress in Human Geography 34, no. 4
(2010): 1–­ 17. Additionally, Sheila Hones, “Teaching and Learning
Guide for Text as It Happens: Literary Geography,” Geography Compass
4, no. 1 (2010): 61–­66 provides a sample syllabus with focus questions
and practical exercises for a class in literary geography.
16. Louise J. Bracken and Elizabeth A. Oughton, “‘What Do You
Mean?’: The Importance of Language in Developing Interdisciplinary
Research,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 31, no. 3
(2006): 371–­82.
17. Massey, For Space, 9.
18. Derek Gregory, “Space,” in The Dictionary of Human Geography, ed.
Derek Gregory et al. (Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2009), 709; Graham
Allen, Intertextuality, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2011), 12.
19. Marie-­Laure Ryan, “Space,” in The Living Handbook of Narratology,
ed. Peter Hühn et al. (Hamburg: Hamburg University, last modified
September 27, 2013), accessed December 7, 2013, http://​www​.lhn​
.uni​-hamburg​.de/​article/​space.
20. David J. Mickelson, “Spatial Form,” in The Routledge Encyclopedia of
Narrative Theory, ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-­Laure
Ryan (London: Routledge, 2005), 55.
21. I take this phrase from Massey, For Space.

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 Notes 185

22. Robert T. Tally Jr., Spatiality (London: Routledge, 2013), 36.

23. Tally, Spatiality, 36, 159.
24. Massey, For Space, 9.
25. Gregory, “Space.”
26. Allen, Intertextuality, 69.
27. Colum McCann, “Aleksandar Hemon in Conversation with Colum
McCann,” interview by Aleksandar Hemon, Believer Magazine, January
2010, accessed May 10, 2014, http://​www​.believermag​.com/​issues/​

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201001/​?read​=interview​_hemon​_mccann.
28. David W. Coughlan, “Written Somewhere: The Social Space of Text”
(PhD diss., Goldsmiths College, University of London, 2002), 207.
29. The literary scholar Neal Alexander, for example, sees his work as
“developing modes of close reading that are attentive to the kinds of
geographical imaginations that are manifest in literary texts,” email
message to author, March 20, 2012. See Neal Alexander and David
Cooper, eds., Poetry and Geography: Space and Place in Postwar Poetry
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013); Neal Alexander, Ciaran
Carson: Space, Place, Writing (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press,
2011).
30. Roland Barthes, Image—­Music—­Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London:
Fontana, 1977), 146–­47, quoted in Allen Intertextuality, 13.
31. Allen, Intertextuality, 12.
32. Massey, For Space, 9.

C hapter 2
1. See, for example, the 2012 International Benchmarking Review of
Human Geography, which claims that in many subfields (including
social and cultural geography), UK geography “is world leading, set-
ting the intellectual agenda and providing articulate spokespersons
and persuasive authors to present new knowledge and fresh concep-
tual insights.” The authors add that bibliometric data indicate “that UK
human geography surpasses in volume and citation impact the output
from other countries.” Their conclusion is that “evidence supports the
conclusion that human geography as a whole in the UK ranks first in the
world.” For a discussion of the reliability and objectivity of this report,
see the exchange between Clive Barnett and Simon Batterbury on Bar-
nett’s Pop Theory blog, accessed May 11, 2014, http://​clivebarnett​
.wordpress​.com/​2013/​03/​23/​were​-number​-one.
2. Brosseau, “Geography’s Literature,” 349.
3. Ibid., 347.
4. James Kneale, “The Virtual Realities of Technology and Fiction: Read-
ing William Gibson’s Cyberspace,” in Virtual Geographies, ed. Michael
Crang, Philip Crang, and Jon May (London: Routledge, 1999), 208.

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186 Notes

5. James L. Machor and Philip Goldstein, eds., Reception Study: From Lit-
erary Theory to Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 2001); Patro-
cinio P. Schweickart and Elizabeth A. Flynn, eds., Reading Sites: Social
Difference and Reader Response (New York: Modern Language Associa-
tion of America, 2004).
6. Sharp, “Towards a Critical Analysis,” 327–­34.
7. See, for example, Erica X. Y. Yap, “Readers-­in-­Conversations: A Politics
of Reading in Literary Geographies,” Social & Cultural Geography 12,

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no. 7 (2011): 793–­807; Patricia Noxolo and Marika Preziuso, “Post-
colonial Imaginations: Approaching a ‘Fictionable’ World through the
Novels of Maryse Condé and Wilson Harris,” Annals of the Association
of American Geographers 103, no. 1 (2013): 163–­79; Angharad Saun-
ders, “The Spatial Event of Writing: John Galsworthy and the Creation
of ‘Fraternity,’” Cultural Geographies 20, no. 3 (2013): 285–­98.
8. Schweickart and Flynn, Reading Sites, 4.
9. For more on the distinction between physical and relational distance,
see Chapter 6.
10. Ian Cook et al., “You Want to Be Careful You Don’t End Up Like Ian.
He’s All over the Place,” in Autobiography in/of an Expanded Field (the
Director’s Cut) (Brighton, UK: University of Sussex Research Paper 34,
1998), 29.
11. Nigel Thrift, acknowledgments for Non-­Representational Theory: Space
/ Politics /Affect (London: Routledge, 2008), ix.
12. This is accessible on YouTube. European Graduate School EGS,
“Colum McCann. Let the Good Great World Spin. 2008. 1/6,” You-
Tube video, posted July 19, 2008, accessed May 11, 2014, http://​www​
.youtube​.com/​watch?v​=tKieCztRyJ8.
13. Details on the audiobook version of The Great World suggest that in fact
McCann did not read one of the chapters; he has, however, performed
excerpts in public readings and in video recordings.
14. Boris Kachka, “Novelist Colum McCann on Let the Great World Spin
and the 9/11 ‘Grief Machine,’” Vulture, June 24, 2009, accessed
May 10, 2014, http://​www​.vulture​.com/​2009/​06/​novelist​_colum​
_mccann​_on​_let​_t​.html.
15. Website accessed May 21, 2014.
16. Kachka, “Novelist Colum McCann.”
17. Coughlan, “Written Somewhere,” 202.
18. Jane Tompkins, “Masterpiece Theater: The Politics of Hawthorne’s Lit-
erary Reputation,” in Reception Study, ed. Machor and Goldstein, 150.
19. Ibid., 149.
20. Stephen Mailloux, Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of
American Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 13.
21. Doreen Massey, “Geographies of Responsibility,” Geografiska Annaler:
Series B, Human Geography 86, no. 1 (2004): 5–­18.
22. Ibid.

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 Notes 187

23. Tompkins, “Masterpiece Theater,” 137.

24. Coughlan, “Written Somewhere,” 202.
25. The term stamp collecting comes from Nigel Thrift, “Landscape and
Literature,” Environment and Planning A 10 (1978): 347–­49. For
an early example of this kind of spatially oriented close reading, see
Marc Brosseau, “The City in Textual Form: Manhattan Transfer’s
New York,” Cultural Geographies 2, no. 1 (1995): 89–­114. For a more
recent discussion of spatially informed close readings of short stories,

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see Sheila Hones, “Literary Geography: Setting and Narrative Space,”
Social and Cultural Geography 12, no. 7 (2011): 685–­99. For a “dis-
tant reading” approach, see Barbara Piatti, Anne-­Kathrin Reuschel, and
Lorenz Hurni, “A Literary Atlas of Europe—­Analysing the Geogra-
phy of Fiction with an Interactive Mapping and Visualisation System,”
in Proceedings of the 25th International Cartographic Conference, ed.
Anne Ruas (Paris, France: French Committee of Cartography, July 3–­­8,
2011). David Cooper and Ian N. Gregory, “Mapping the English Lake
District: A Literary GIS,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geogra-
phers 36, no. 1 (2011), 89–108, offers an example of mixed close and
distant reading using GIS and mapping techniques.
26. Catherine Brace and Adeline Johns-­Putra, “Recovering Inspiration in
the Spaces of Creative Writing,” Transactions of the Institute of Brit-
ish Geographers 35, no. 3 (2010): 399–­413; also see Saunders, “Spatial
Event of Writing” and Yap, “Readers-­in-­Conversations.”
27. Hones, “Text as It Happens,” and “Teaching and Learning Guide.”
28. Massey, For Space, 141.
29. Ibid.
30. Nigel Thrift, Spatial Formations (London: Sage, 1996), 41.
31. Massey, For Space, 9.
32. Derek Gregory, “Edward Said’s Imaginative Geographies,” in Think-
ing Space, ed. Michael Crang and Nigel Thrift (London: Routledge,
2000), 231.

C hapter 3
1. Hsuan L. Hsu, Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-­
Century American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2010); Jon
Hegglund, World Views: Metageographies of Modernist Fiction (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Hones, “Literary Geography: Set-
ting and Narrative Space,” 685–­99; Yap, “Readers-­in-­Conversations.”
2. On metageography and the “mosaic” view of space, see Jonathan V.
Beaverstock, Richard G. Smith, and Peter J. Taylor, “World-­City Net-
work: A New Metageography?” Annals of the Association of American
Geographers 90, no. 1 (2004): 123–­34; Derek Gregory, “Metageogra-
phy,” in The Dictionary of Human Geography, ed. Derek Gregory et al.
(Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2009), 456.

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188 Notes

3. On spaces of exception, see, for example, Derek Gregory, “The Black

Flag: Guantanamo Bay and the Space of Exception,” Geografiska
Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 88, no. 4 (2006): 405–­27.
4. McCann, The Great World, 11.
5. Ibid., 343.
6. Ibid., 22.
7. Ibid., 78.
8. Ibid., 112.

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9. Ibid., 124.
10. Ibid., 172.
11. Ibid., 174.
12. Ibid., 175.
13. Ibid., 177.
14. The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the
original core network that developed into the World Wide Web.
15. McCann, The Great World, 178.
16. Ibid., 197.
17. Ibid., 199.
18. Ibid., 200.
19. Ibid., 201.
20. Ibid., 209.
21. Ibid., 222.
22. Ibid., 237.
23. Ibid., 238.
24. Ibid., 241.
25. Ibid., 3.
26. Ibid., 243.
27. Ibid., 273.
28. Ibid., 276.
29. Ibid., 284.
30. Ibid., 285.
31. Ibid., 289.
32. Ibid., 308.
33. Ibid., 322.
34. Ibid., 329.
35. Ibid., 329.
36. Ibid., 331.
37. Ibid., 332.
38. Ibid., 334.
39. Ibid., 338.
40. Ibid., 341.
41. Ibid., 342–­43.
42. Ibid., 346.
43. Ibid., 349.

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 Notes 189

Chapter 4
1. Joel Lovell, “Colum McCann’s Radical Empathy,” New York Times
Magazine, May 30, 2013, accessed May 10, 2014, http://​www​.nytimes​
.com/​2013/​06/​02/​magazine/​colum​-mccanns​-radical​-empathy​.html.
2. See, for instance, editor M. J. Broccoli’s comments on “inaccuracies”
in the geography of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Broccoli’s comments
are discussed briefly in Hones, “Literary Geography: Setting and Narra-

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tive Space.”
3. McCann, The Great World, 24.
4. Ibid., 31–­32.
5. All these comments were appended to the review at Sheistoofondofbooks​
.com between May 10 and June 19, 2010.
6. McCann, The Great World, 3.
7. David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1996): 261, quoted in Jon Murdoch, Post-­Structuralist
Geography: A Guide to Relational Space (London: Sage, 2005), 19.
8. Massey, For Space, 12.
9. Ibid., 67; Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, 261.
10. McCann, The Great World, 248.
11. McCann, “Q&A.”
12. McCann, The Great World, 57.
13. McCann, “Walking,” 360.
14. McCann, The Great World, 29–­30.
15. Ibid., 29.
16. McCann and Englander, “A Conversation,” 362.
17. McCann, “Walking,” 357.
18. Ibid., 358.
19. Ibid., 359.
20. Ibid., 360.
21. McCann and Englander, “A Conversation,” 362.
22. Massey, For Space, 139.
23. In an endnote to this passage, Massey corrects a persistent misreading
of her use of the term layers, in which the term is taken as a geological
metaphor, in which the layers, she points out, “have little temporality
and still less mutual interaction—­which wasn’t what I meant at all.”
Massey, For Space, 201.
24. McCann, The Great World, 326.
25. The image of the crumpled handkerchief is taken from the work of
Michael Serres. See Murdoch, Post-­Structuralist Geography, 94, quot-
ing from Michael Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science,
Culture and Time (University of Michigan Press, 1990), 60.
26. McCann, The Great World, 73.
27. Ibid., 76.
28. Ibid., 77.
29. Ibid., 81.

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190 Notes

30. Ibid., 174.

31. Ibid., 24.
32. Ibid., 40.
33. Ibid., 34.
34. Ibid., 71.
35. Ibid., 144.
36. Ibid., 78.
37. Ibid., 126.

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38. Ibid., 154.
39. Ibid., 127.
40. Ibid., 132.
41. Ibid., 134.
42. Ibid., 61.
43. Ibid., 61–­63.
44. Ibid., 69.
45. Ibid., 136.
46. Ibid., 142.
47. Ibid., 149.
48. Ibid., 210.
49. Ibid., 221.
50. Ibid., 236.
51. Ibid., 321.
52. Ibid., 322.
53. Homi K. Bhabha, “The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha,”
in Identity, Community and Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (Lon-
don: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 207–­21.
54. Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-­and-­
Imagined Places (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
55. Soja, Thirdspace, 57.
56. Murdoch, Post-­Structuralist Geography, 14; Soja, Thirdspace, 276.

Chapter 5
1. Marcus Doel, “Un-­Glunking Geography: Spatial Science after Dr. Seuss
and Gilles Deleuze,” in Thinking Space, ed. Michael Crang and Nigel
Smith (London: Routledge, 2000), 125.
2. Massey, For Space, 17.
3. Doreen Massey, “Politics and Space/Time,” New Left Review 196
(1992): 66.
4. Beth Rundstrom, “Reapers of Land, Keepers of Culture,” Middle States
Geographer 28 (1996): 1.
5. Sabine Buchholz and Manfred Jahn, “Space in Narrative,” in Herman
et al., The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, 551–­54.
6. David Herman, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (Lin-
coln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 265.

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 Notes 191

7. Rosalie Vermette, “Terrae Incantatae: The Symbolic Geography of

Twelfth-­ Century Arthurian Romance,” in Mallory and Simpson-­
Housley, Geography and Literature, 146.
8. Gregory, “Space,” 708.
9. David Harvey, Social Justice and the City (London: Edward Arnold,
1973), 14.
10. Ryan, “Space,” paragraphs 6–­10.
11. The definition of narratology taken from The Living Handbook of Nar-

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ratology, ed. Peter Hühn et al. (Hamburg: Hamburg University, last
modified September 27, 2013), accessed May 11, 2014, http://​www​
.lhn​.uni​-hamburg​.de/​article/​space.
12. Ryan, “Space,” paragraph 2.
13. Gregory, “Space,” 707.
14. Ryan, “Space”; John Horton and Peter Kraftl, Cultural Geographies:
An Introduction (London, Routledge, 2014), 270.
15. Massey, “Politics and Space/Time,” 66.
16. Susan Stanford Friedman, “Spatial Poetics and Arundhati Roy’s The
God of Small Things,” in A Companion to Narrative Theory, ed. James
Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 204.
17. Massey, For Space, 183.
18. Alexander and Cooper, Poetry and Geography, 5.
19. Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge, “Code and the Transduction of
Space,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95, no. 1
(2005): 162–­80.
20. Murdoch, Post-­Structuralist Geography, 18; Doel, “Un-­ Glunking
Geography,” 125.
21. Michael Crang and Nigel Thrift, “Introduction,” in Thinking Space
(London: Routledge, 2000), 2.
22. McCann, The Great World, 161.
23. Ibid., 346.
24. Ibid., 243.
25. Ibid., 279.
26. Ibid., 103.
27. Ibid., 164.
28. Massey, For Space, 61.
29. Ibid., 9.
30. This was not, in fact, the sentence given to Philippe Petit but the one
given to George Willig, “the human fly,” who climbed the South Tower
in 1977. The sentence was decided by New York City mayor Abraham
Beame.
31. McCann, The Great World, 248.
32. Ibid., 248–­49.
33. Ibid., 141.
34. Ibid., 325.
35. Ibid.

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192 Notes

36. Ibid.
37. Doreen Massey, “A Global Sense of Place,” in Space, Place and Gender
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 7.
38. McCann and Englander, “A Conversation,” 369.
39. Ibid., 368.
40. Nigel Thrift, “Space: The Fundamental Stuff of Human Geography,”
in Key Concepts in Geography, eds. Nicholas J. Clifford et al. (London:
Sage, 2003), 105.

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41. J. K. Wright, “Terrae Incognitae: The Place of Imagination in Geog-
raphy,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 37, no. 1
(1947): 1.

Chapter 6
1. Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel (London: Verso, 1998),
13.
2. The mapping of world city networks using data such as airline flow or
financial transactions might provide a starting model for this kind of
literary cartography.
3. McCann, The Great World, 24.
4. Ibid., 78.
5. Ibid., 106.
6. Ibid., 102.
7. Ibid., 57.
8. Brosseau, “Geography’s Literature,” 349.
9. McCann, The Great World, 66.
10. Ibid., 343.
11. Ibid., 22–­23.
12. Ibid., 233.
13. Ibid., 233.
14. Ibid., 234.
15. Ibid., 196.
16. Ibid., 243.
17. Ibid., 191.
18. Ibid., 193.
19. Ibid., 194–­95.
20. Ibid., 187.
21. Ibid., 188.
22. Kitchin and Dodge, “Code and the Transduction of Space,” 162. See
also Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge, Code/Space: Software and Every-
day Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).
23. Ibid.
24. McCann, The Great World, 83.
25. Ibid., 88.
26. Ibid., 90.

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 Notes 193

27. Ibid., 86.

28. Ibid., 87.
29. Ibid., 101.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., 88.
32. Ibid., 103.
33. Ibid., 84.
34. Ibid., 149.

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35. Nick Bingham, “Actor-­Network Theory (ANT),” in The Dictionary of
Human Geography, 5th ed., eds. Derek Gregory et al. (Oxford: Wiley-­
Blackwell, 2009), 6–­7.
36. John Law, “Introduction,” in Actor Network Theory and After, ed. John
Law and John Hassard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 1–­14.
37. Ibid., 3.
38. Ibid., 6.
39. Ibid., 7.
40. McCann, The Great World, 21.
41. Ibid., 22.
42. Ibid., 36.
43. Ibid., 37.
44. Richard Carter-­White, email to author, August 9 2013.
45. McCann, The Great World, 337.
46. Ibid., 337.
47. Ibid., 90.
48. Ibid., 338.
49. Ibid., 338.
50. Bingham, “Actor-­Network Theory,” 6–­7.
51. McCann, The Great World, 91.
52. Ibid., 315–­16.
53. Ibid., 107.
54. Ibid., 149.
55. Ibid., 322.
56. McCann and Englander, “A Conversation,” 363.
57. McCann, The Great World, 241.
58. Ibid., 115.
59. Ibid., 68.
60. Massey, For Space, 186.
61. Ibid., 187.
62. McCann, The Great World, 114.

Chapter 7
1. On literary tourism, see, for example, the following: Michael Crang,
“Placing Jane Austen, Displacing England: Between Book, History and
Nation,” in Jane Austen and Co. Remaking the Past in Contemporary

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194 Notes

Culture, ed. Suzanne Rodin Pucci and James Thompson (Buffalo:

SUNY Press, 2002), 111–­ 32; Dydia DeLyser, “Ramona Memories:
Fiction, Tourist Practices, and Placing the Past in Southern California,”
Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93, no. 4 (2003):
886–­908; Nuala C. Johnson, “Fictional Journeys: Paper Landscapes,
Tourist Trails and Dublin’s Literary Texts,” Social and Cultural Geogra-
phy 5, no. 1 (2004): 91–­107; Deborah Philips, “Mapping Literary Brit-
ain: Tourist Guides to Literary Landscapes 1951–­2007,” Tourist Studies

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11, no. 1 (April 1, 2011): 21–­35; Clarissa Wallace, “Yeats’s Country
and ‘Yeats Country’: Conceptualizing Literary Spaces,” Journal of Tour-
ism and Cultural Change 7, no. 1 (2009): 48–­60.
2. The phrase is used by ignatius in a comment posted to the August
2010 book discussion of The Great World on the College Confidential
website.
3. Kyle Smith, “Danger above and below,” Wall Street Journal, last modi-
fied July 3, 2009, accessed May 11, 2014, http://​online​.wsj​.com/​
news/​articles/​SB124657711148489203.
4. McCann, “Walking,” 358–­59.
5. Petit, To Reach the Clouds; Mordicai Gerstein, The Man Who Walked
between the Towers (New Milford, CT. Roaring Brook Press, 2003);
James Marsh, dir., Man on Wire (Red Box Films, 2008).
6. McCann and Englander, “A Conversation,” 364.
7. China Miéville, The City and the City (London: Macmillan, 2009).
8. McCann, The Great World, 77.
9. Thomas Wolfe, Bonfire of the Vanities (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux,
1987; New York: Vintage Books, 2010).
10. Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City (New York: Vintage Books,
1984), 93.
11. Colum McCann, “Author’s Note,” in Let the Great World Spin, 351.
12. McCann, The Great World, 243.
13. Petit, To Reach the Clouds, 192.
14. Ibid., 200.
15. McCann, The Great World, 115.
16. Ibid., 117.
17. Ibid., 136.
18. Ibid., 137.
19. Wolfe, Bonfire, 82.
20. Ibid., 92.
21. McInerney, Bright Lights, 1.
22. Wolfe, Bonfire, 10–­11.
23. Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho (New York: Vintage Books, 1991).
24. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribner, 1925; New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 64.
25. Fitzgerald, Gatsby, 169.

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 Notes 195

Chapter 8
1. McCann, The Great World, 25.
2. Coughlan, “Written Somewhere,” 202–­7.
3. Ibid.
4. McCann, The Great World, 250.
5. Ibid., 75.
6. Ibid., 89.

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7. Ibid., 59–­60.
8. Ibid., 214.
9. Ibid., 148.
10. Ibid., 125.
11. Ibid., 116.
12. Ibid., 69.
13. Fitzgerald, Gatsby, 151.
14. McCann, The Great World, 117.
15. Ibid., 118.
16. Ibid., 150.
17. Ibid., 151.
18. Fitzgerald, Gatsby, 169.
19. Ibid., 139.
20. Ibid., 117.
21. Ibid., 128.
22. McCann, The Great World, 126.
23. Fitzgerald, Gatsby, 117.
24. McCann, The Great World, 126.
25. Fitzgerald, Gatsby, 10.
26. McCann, The Great World, 161.
27. Fitzgerald, Gatsby, 192.
28. McCann, The Great World, 89.
29. Fitzgerald, Gatsby, 151.
30. McCann, “Walking,” 357–­60.
31. McCann and Englander, “A Conversation,” 363.
32. Mark Anthony Jarman, “Country on a Wire,” Globe and Mail, July 10,
2009, accessed May 10, 2014, http://​ www​ .theglobeandmail​
.com/​
arts/​books​-and​-media/​let​-the​-great​-world​-spin​-by​-colum​-mccann/​
article4278850.
33. John Cusatis, Understanding Colum McCann (Columbia, SC: Univer-
sity of South Carolina Press, 2011).
34. Colum McCann, “Without a Map: A Conversation with Michael
Ondaatje and Colum McCann at the New York Public Library in
Conjunction with the PEN World Voices Festival 2008,” interview
by Michael Ondaatje, accessed May 10, 2014, http://​colummccann​
.com/​interviews/​let​-the​-great​-world​-spin​-qa.
35. McCann and Englander, “A Conversation,” 370.
36. Ibid., 209.

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196 Notes

37. McCann, The Great World, 214.

38. Ibid., 211.
39. Ibid., 60.
40. Alfred Tennyson, “Locksley Hall,” lines 192–­94.
41. Colum McCann, “Things Come Together, Things Fall apart,” PEN
America website, June 23, 2008, accessed May 10, 2014, http://​www​
.pen​.org/​nonfiction​-essay​-transcript/​things​-come​-together​-things​-fall​
-apart.

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42. Coughlan, “Written Somewhere,” 84.

Chapter 9
1. See also Brace and Johns-­Putra, “Recovering Inspiration,” 2010.
2. Saunders, “Spatial Event of Writing.”
3. Joanne P. Sharp, “Locating Imaginary Homelands: Literature, Geogra-
phy, and Salman Rushdie,” GeoJournal 38, no. 1 (1996): 125.
4. Ibid., 126.
5. Marc Brosseau emphasized the point that a literary text was an “intri-
cate and complex signifying practice” in his argument that geographers
should pay more attention to the text as text in his review article “Geog-
raphy’s Literature.” Sharp follows up this point by arguing against too
complete a shift toward textual analysis. Sharp, “Towards a Critical
Analysis,” 333.
6. Charles W. J. Withers and Innes M. Keighren, “Travels into Print:
Authoring, Editing and Narratives of Travel and Exploration, c. 1815–­
c. 1857,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 36, no. 4
(2011): 560–­73; Robert J. Mayhew, “Materialist Hermeneutics, Textu-
ality and the History of Geography: Print Spaces in British Geography,
c.1500–­1900,” Journal of Historical Geography 33, no. 3 (July 2007):
466–­88.
7. Saunders, “Literary Geography: Reforging the Connections,” 2.
8. Nick Bingham, “Actor-­Network Theory (ANT),” 6–­7.
9. Ibid.
10. Tompkins, “Masterpiece Theater,” 149.
11. Colum McCann, “Colum McCann Interview,” Beijing City Weekend,
March 5, 2010, accessed May 10, 2014, http://​www​.cityweekend​.com​
.cn/​beijing/​blog/​colum​-mccann​-interview​-author​-of​-let​-the​-great​
-world​-spin​-discusses​-his​-national​-book​-award​-winning​-novel​-ahead​
-of​-the​-bookworm​-intl​-literary​-festival.
12. McCann, “Aleksandar Hemon in Conversation.”
13. Colum McCann, “Interview with Colum McCann,” interview by Bret
Anthony Johnston, National Book Foundation, accessed May 10, 2014,
http://​www​.nationalbook​.org/​nba2009​_f​_mccann​_interv​.html.
14. Colum McCann, “Colum McCann, Author of Let the Great World
Spin (Interview),” interview by Tisah Tucknott, Trendhunter, August 6

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 Notes 197

2009, accessed May 10, 2014, http://​www​.trendhunter​.com/​trends/​

colum​-mccann​-interview.
15. Lovell, “Colum McCann’s Radical Empathy.”
16. Colum McCann, “Colm Toibin and Colum McCann in Conversa-
tion at Cheltenham,” interview by Colm Toibin, transcript from ABC
Radio (Australia) broadcast, October 27, 2009, at 10:05 a.m., accessed
May 10, 2014, http://​www​.abc​.net​.au/​radionational/​programs/​
bookshow/​ c olm ​ - toibin ​ - and ​ - colum ​ - mccann ​ - in ​ - conversation ​ - at/​

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3099068.
17. McCann, “Without a Map,” accessed May 10, 2014, http://​
colummccann​.com/​interviews2.
18. Alexandra Alter, “How to Write a Great Novel,” Wall Street Journal,
last modified November 13 2009, http://​ online​ .wsj​
.com/​news/​
articles/​SB10001424052748703740004574513463106012106.
19. McCann, “Aleksandar Hemon in Conversation with Colum McCann.”
20. Speaking of what Hemon refers to as literary “spats and mouth-­offs,”
McCann muses,
A lot of it went on in previous generations of writers (nothing as
good as fifth-­century Greece, I suppose) but now we’re backed
up against a different wall, and perhaps the fear is that nobody’s
watching and so we need to make noise. I think this prospect of
irrelevance is what we buck up against, and perhaps that brings us
together. But I’m worried. Here we are, post-­Bush, but still in the
middle of a national regression to the robber-­baron mentality, the
continued opposition to enlightened social legislation, the ongo-
ing kowtow to the lowest common denominator.
21. PEN America, “New European Fiction,” YouTube video, posted
May 4, 2010, accessed May 11, 2014, http://​ www​ .youtube​
.com/​
watch?v​=gbPXuASTz3I.
22. McCann, “Aleksandar Hemon in Conversation.”
23. I say “predominantly textually produced” because there are video and
audio interviews involving the author readily available online. Never-
theless, I think most members of the reading public will engage with
“Colum McCann” as he appears in texts.
24. Lovell, “Colum McCann’s Radical Empathy.”
25. Ibid.
26. McCann, “Without a Map.”
27. Allen, Intertextuality, 40.
28. McCann, “Without a Map.”
29. McCann, “Colum McCann Interview,” Beijing City Weekend.
30. McCann, “Q&A.”
31. McCann, “Without a Map.”
32. I capitalize the term Gypsy here to acknowledge a point McCann made
in the 2008 interview: “I think they’re the only people in the world who

10.1057/9781137413130 - Literary Geographies, Sheila Hones

198 Notes

don’t get a capital letter. What’s that about, if it’s not about dehuman-
isation? The Irish Times do it. I was shocked. It’s in their style book.”
33. Colum McCann, “A Conversation with Colum McCann,” inter-
view by Farah Miller, O, The Oprah Magazine, July 2009, accessed
May 10, 2014, http://​www​.oprah​.com/​omagazine/​Colum​-McCann​
-Interview​-About​-Let​-the​-Great​-World​-Spin.
34. McCann, “Colm Toibin and Colum McCann.”
35. Rita Papazian, “Author Column McCann Weaves Words, Worlds

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Together,” Fairfield Citizen Online, February 12, 2010, accessed
May 10, 2014, http://​www​.fairfieldcitizenonline​.com/​entertainment/​
article/​ A uthor​ - Column​ - McCann​ - weaves​ - words ​ - worlds ​ - together​
-361989​.php.
36. McCann, “Aleksandar Hemon in Conversation.”

Chapter 1 0
1. McCann, “Walking,” 360.
2. See, for example, Yap, “Readers-­ in-­
Conversations”; Noxolo and
Preziuso, “Postcolonial Imaginations.”
3. McCann, “Q&A.”
4. Bill Morris, “To Blurb or Not to Blurb?,” February 15, 2011, accessed
May 11, 2014, http://​www​.themillions​.com/​2011/​02/​to​-blurb​-or​
-not​-to​-blurb​.html.
5. McCann and Englander, “A Conversation,” 370.
6. Edward Finn, “The Social Lives of Books: Literary Networks in Con-
temporary American Fiction” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2010).
7. Hones, “Text as It Happens,” 1302.
8. Tompkins, “Masterpiece Theater,” 137.
9. McCann, “Aleksandar Hemon in Conversation.”
10. Hones, “Text as It Happens,” 1307.
11. On geographies of reception, see, for example, Innes M. Keighren,
“Bringing Geography to the Book: Charting the Reception of Influ-
ences of Geographic Environment,” Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers 31, no. 4 (2006): 525–­40; David L. Livingstone, “Science,
Text and Space: Thoughts on the Geography of Reading,” Transactions
of the Institute of British Geographers 30, no. 4 (2005): 391–­401.
12. Yap, “Readers-­in-­Conversations.” In focusing on the politics of reading,
Yap is here following Richard Phillips in his work on children’s sto-
ries; see, for example, his “Politics of Reading: Decolonizing Children’s
Geographies,” Cultural Geographies 8, no. 2 (2001): 125–­50.
13. Lovell, “Colum McCann’s Radical Empathy.”
14. Carleigh Stiehm, “Let the Great World Spin Chosen as Duke’s
Class of 2017 Summer Reading,” The Chronicle: The Independent
Daily at Duke University, March 27, 2013, accessed May 10, 2014,

10.1057/9781137413130 - Literary Geographies, Sheila Hones

 Notes 199

http:// ​ w ww​. dukechronicle​ . com/​ a rticles/​ 2 013/ ​ 0 3/ ​ 2 6/ ​ l et ​ - great​

-world​-spin​-chosen​-dukes​-class​-2017​-summer​-reading.
15. ch107​@duke​.edu, “Let the Great World Spin Selected as Class of
2017 Summer Reading,” Duke University Student Affairs Blog,
accessed May 10, 2014, https://​studentaffairs​.duke​.edu/​blog​-entry/​
%E2%80%98let ​ - great ​ - world ​ - spin%E2%80%99 ​ - selected ​ - class ​ - 2017​
-summer​-reading?page​=2.
16. Sasha Zients, “McCann Urges Students to Embrace Potential Failure,”

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The Duke University Chronicle, August 31, 2013, accessed May 10, 2014,
http:// ​ w ww​. dukechronicle ​ . com/ ​ a rticles/ ​ 2 013/​ 0 8/​ 3 1/​ m ccann​
-urges​-students​-embrace​-potential​-failure.
17. McCann and Englander, “A Conversation,” 363.
18. Zients, “McCann Urges Students.”
19. Emma Baccellieri, “Colum McCann Talks 9/11, Literature,” The
Duke University Chronicle, September 3, 2013, accessed May 10,
2014, http://​www​.dukechronicle​.com/​articles/​2013/​09/​03/​colum​
-mccann​-talks​-911​-literature.
20. Ibid.

Chapter 1 1
1. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the collaborative contribu-
tions of my colleagues at the journal Literary Geographies.
2. Masato Mori, “Country Report: Translation and Transformation:
Transactions in Japanese Social and Cultural Geography,” Social & Cul-
tural Geography 10, no. 3 (2009): 369–­97.
3. Hones, “Text as It Happens,” 1311.
4. James Kneale, “Commentary on: ‘Text as It Happens: Literary Geog-
raphy,” Compass Interdisciplinary Virtual Conference, from an online
conference held October 2009, accessed May 11, 2014, http://​
compassconference​.files​.wordpress​.com/​2009/​10/​civc​-commentary​
-james​-kneale​-university​-college​-london​-on​-text​-as​-it​-happens​-literary​
-geography​-sheila​-hones​.pdf.
5. Already, in practical terms, the hope I expressed in our 2008 online
discussion—­for “some kind of open-­access clearing house or running
bibliography to help us keep up . . . where work we found relevant
to the interdisciplinary project of literary geography could be reviewed
or even just listed . . .”—­was first partly fulfilled in 2012 with the
launch of the online open-­ access bibliography website http://​ www​
.literarygeographies​.wordpress​.com and then further satisfied in 2013
with the launch of the interdisciplinary open-­access e-­journal Literary
Geographies, http://​www​.literarygeographies​.net.
6. Coughlan, “Written Somewhere,” 205.
7. Tally, Spatiality, 79.
8. Massey, For Space, 5.

10.1057/9781137413130 - Literary Geographies, Sheila Hones

200 Notes

9. David Matless, “Book Review: An Atlas of the European Novel 1800–­

1900,” Progress in Human Geography 23, no. 4 (1999): 659–­60. David
Harvey, “The Cartographic Imagination: Balzac in Paris,” Cosmopolitan
Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture (New York: Rout-
ledge: 2001), 63–­87.
10. Massey, For Space, 5.
11. Ibid., 15.
12. Ibid., 142.

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13. Thacker, “The Idea of a Critical Literary Geography,” 60.
14. Donald H. Rumsfeld, presenter, “DoD News Briefing—­ Secretary
Rumsfeld and Gen. Myers,” US Department of Defense news transcript,
February 12, 2002, accessed May 10, 2014, http://​www​.defense​.gov/​
Transcripts/​Transcript​.aspx?TranscriptID​=2636.
15. Saunders, “Spatial Event of Writing,” 285.
16. Bertrand Westphal, Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces, trans. Rob-
ert T. Tally Jr. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
17. Robert T. Tally Jr., “On Geocriticism,” in Geocritical Explorations:
Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Robert
T. Tally Jr. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 1.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid, 2.
20. Horton and Kraftl, Cultural Geographies, 2.
21. Eric Prieto, Literature, Geography, and the Postmodern Poetics of Place
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 17.
22. Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell,
2004), 20; emphasis added.
23. Horton and Kraftl, Cultural Geographies, 100; emphasis added.
24. Ibid., 122.
25. Joanne P. Sharp, “Humanistic Geography,” in The Dictionary of Human
Geography, ed. Derek Gregory et al. (Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2009),
359.
26. Eric Prieto, “Geocriticism Meets Ecocriticism: Bertrand West-
phal and Environmental Thinking,” Épistémocritique: Littérature et
Savoirs, January 3, 2012, http://​www​.epistemocritique​.org/​spip​.php​
?article238&lang​=fr.
27. See, for example, Clive Barnett, “‘A Choice of Nightmares’: Narration
and Desire in Heart of Darkness,” Gender, Place and Culture 3, no. 3
(1996): 277–­92.
28. McCann and Englander, “A Conversation,” 363; McCann, “Walking,”
359.
29. “TransAtlantic,” accessed May 11, 2014, http://​colummccann​.com/​
books/​transatlantic.
30. Hermione Hoby, “Colum McCann: A Life in Writing,” The Guardian,
May 25, 2013, accessed May 25, 2014, http://​www​.theguardian​.com/​
culture/​2013/​may/​25/​colum​-mccann​-life​-in​-writing.

10.1057/9781137413130 - Literary Geographies, Sheila Hones

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 Index

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academic space-­time, 13, 15, 19, Bright Lights, Big City (Jay
163–­77 McInerney), 107–­8, 112
and collaboration, 178–­79 Brosseau, Marc, 21, 87, 171, 177
and language, 173–­75, 177
as textual-­material space, 13, care, geographies of, 46, 65, 86–­89,
15 99–­100, 110
textual production of, 163–­79 City and the City, The (China
and simultaneity, 37, 77–­81, Miéville), 104–­6, 172
170–­71 and coterminous locations, 104
actor-­network theory (ANT), 93–­ and metageographies, 105
97, 131 See also cross-­hatching
Amazon.com, 25, 137, 179–­81 code-­space, 12, 42, 83, 91–­92
and online reading collaboration,
American Psycho (Bret Easton Ellis),
154
107, 113, 114
College Confidential Parent Café
Anderson, Neal, 75, 185
book club, 151, 154
Atlas of the European Novel. See
community, 94–­97, 100, 154–­55
Moretti, Franco
Compass Interdisciplinary Virtual
audiobooks, 27–­30, 54, 67, 154
Conference 2009, 165
“author, the,” 23, 25, 35, 131, context, geographical definition of,
136–­44 33
Cook, Ian, 23–­24
Bakhtin, M. M., 9 Cooper, David, 75, 185
Barnett, Clive, 185 Coughlan, David, 29, 117–­18, 128,
Barthes, Roland, 9, 14, 17, 26 167
Bhabha, Homi, 66 creation (literary), geographies of.
Bonfire of the Vanities (Thomas See production (literary)
Wolfe), 106–­7, 110–­12, 120 cross-­hatching, 106–­7, 112, 119, 122
book blurbs, 145–­48 in The City and the City, 105
book covers, 145–­49 and narrative style, 112–­14
books and social space, 116–­19 and plot events, 107–­12
book tours, virtual. See TLC Book and shared locations, 105–­7
Tours Cusatis, John, 125

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212 Index

DeLuca, Vic, photograph of Hemon, Aleksander, 132, 135–­36,

Philippe Petit, 43, 47, 82, 128 152
democratic space, novel as, 143,
152 interdisciplinarity, 2–­11, 16, 21, 70–­
See also readers “complete the 72, 74, 130, 163–­65, 167, 171,
story” 174, 176–­77, 183
distance and proximity, 7, 12, 35, intertextuality, 13, 15, 100–­14,
39, 46, 81, 85–­94, 99–­100, 115–­28, 166

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101, 105, 117, 160, 169, 172
distant reading, 31, 85, 86, 166, Kneale, James, 22, 165
172 Kristeva, Julia, 9
Doel, Marcus, 70, 76
“doorstop to despair,” the novel as Lavin Agency, the, 137–­38
a, 5, 59–­60, 116, 125–­26, 161 Lefebvre, Henri, 9, 66, 71
Dublin, 3, 25, 37, 39–­40, 49, 51, Let the Great World Spin
82, 86, 88–­89 chapter outline of, 38–­50
Duke University reading event, reader comments on, 27–­30, 52–­
158–­60 55, 101, 148–­49, 151–­52,
154–­60
ebooks, 30, 154 reviews of, 30, 102, 146
technicity, transduction, and structure of, 38–­39
connectivity, 41–­42, 78, Literary Geographies (bibliography
92–­94 website), 199
Englander, Nathan, 58, 83 Literary Geographies (book)
event of the text. See text as as a collaborative writer-­text-­
collaborative spatial event reader event, 4, 7, 15–­17,
111, 182
fiction as a spatial practice. See text geography of, 164, 182
as collaborative spatial event interdisciplinary position of, 4,
Frank, Joseph. See spatial form 7–­11, 16, 37–­38, 69–­70,
119
geocriticism, 170, 172–­75, 177–­78 Literary Geographies (journal), 199
geography, cultural, 3, 7–­8, 16, 20–­ literary geography, 3, 15, 17, 19–­
23, 36, 76, 164, 169–­70, 173, 22, 31, 35–­36, 71–­72, 75–­76,
175–­78 163–­79, 184
geography, humanistic, 20–­21, 126–­ critical literary geography and,
27, 176–­77 171
geosophy, 84 geography of, l, 15, 164, 166–­67
Great Gatsby, The (F. Scott global cities and, 184
Fitzgerald), 14, 107, 110–­14, language of, 21, 173–­75
119–­25, 158 mapping and, 31, 52, 61, 84,
Gregory, Derek, 73–­74 85–­86, 117
teaching, 184
Hartshorne, Richard, 72 literary tourism, 36, 67, 101
Harvey, David, 8, 56, 72 Literaturkartographie, 174

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local-­global geographies, 132–­33 geographical definition of, 94

“Locksley Hall” (Alfred Tennyson), intertextual, 107
124–­27, 155 online reader networks and
discussions, 33, 52–­55, 150
Man on Wire (film), 103 of promotion (see TLC Book
Massey, Doreen, 6, 8, 9, 10–­11, 17, Tours)
32–­34, 56, 59–­60, 69, 71, 74–­ New York, as setting, 5, 9, 12, 13,
75, 78, 80, 83, 100, 168, 170 39–­41, 43–­46, 56, 60–­63, 66–­

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material conditions of writing, 67, 70, 82, 100–­103, 101–­2,
geographies of, 131–­35 115, 125, 132, 172
material hermeneutics, 131 accuracy of, 20, 51–­55, 66–­67,
McCann, Colum 101–­2, 155, 157
interviews, conversations, and New York Times, Big City Book
memoirs, 3–­6, 24, 51, 58, Club, 54, 151, 154–­57
83, 99, 102–­3, 126, 128, 9/11 (September 11, 2001), 2,
132–­37, 139, 141–­43, 146, 3, 5–­6, 44, 48, 56–­59, 103,
152, 160–­61 125, 128, 132–­33, 138, 160,
pre-­2009 novels, 25, 138, 140–­ 178
41, 146, 180
views on reader agency, 4, 8, 14–­ online discussions and book clubs,
15, 103–­4, 146, 152, 156, 29–­30, 33, 52–­55, 145–­46,
160–­61 150–­51, 153, 154–­57, 180–­81
visit to Duke University, 160 protocol of, 151, 155
visit to Sandy Hook High School,
139, 157–­58 paratext, 24–­25, 118, 126
writing practice, geographies of, Petit, Philippe, 1–­4, 6, 8, 12–­13,
132–­35 39, 43, 47, 56, 59, 92, 103–­4,
“McCann, Colum” (author figure), 106–­9, 125–­26, 178–­79
3, 6, 14, 24, 134–­44, 160 place, 32, 35, 56, 59–­60, 69, 71,
metageography, 36–­37, 70, 73, 83, 75, 82, 176
105, 172 point of view. See narrative voice and
Moretti, Franco, Atlas of the point of view
European Novel, 85, 164–­72 Prieto, Eric, 175–­77
Mu’allaqat, the, 126–­27, 161 production (literary), geographies
narrative space, 5, 11–­12, 36, 60, of, 14, 102–­3, 129–­35
69–­84, 90, 115, 170 (see also promotion (literary), geographies
narratology) of, 14, 135–­44, 146–­50
promotion and reception,
narrative voice and point of view, 5, interrelation of, 14–­15, 144,
51, 55, 116, 122–­25 159
narratology, space in, 9, 12, 71–­4,
170–­79, 175 “reader, the,” 8, 28–­30, 33, 145–­
networks, 12, 27, 81, 84, 85, 92–­ 46, 152
98, 117, 126, 132 reader response theory, 22–­23, 54
author networks and blurbs, 147 readers and critics, 147, 150, 153

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214 Index

readers “complete the story,” 4, 8, simultaneity, spatial aspects of, 10,

14–­15, 103–­4, 146, 156, 160 13, 25–­26, 33, 60, 78, 80, 83,
reading 124–­25, 168, 171, 175–­78
and audiobooks, 27–­30, 54, 67, Soja, Edward, 8, 13, 66
154 space and place, distinction between,
as collaboration, 74–­75, 161 75
as conversation with the author, space and space-­time
144 as container, 9, 17, 37, 71–­72,

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reading, collective, 28–­32, 155, 76, 83, 170
159–­60 as dimension of simultaneity and
as context, 31, 151 interaction, 8, 17, 77–­79,
See also Duke University reading 82, 170
event; Sandy Hook High intertextual, 12–­14, 70, 179
School reading event mixed physical, social, and
reading, geographies of, 154 allusive, 51, 60, 115–­17,
reading spatially, 31, 37, 70, 83, 119, 122–­24, 160
187 narrative coherence and, 12, 81,
reception (literary), geographies 83
of, 14–­15, 103–­4, 129–­31, as the product of interrelations, 8,
145–­61 37, 65, 76, 79–­82
resisting readers, 15, 52–­55, 102, textual-­geographical, 8, 9, 17,
156–­57, 159, 160 116, 122, 158, 160, 167
Rumi (Jalāl ad-­Dīn Muhammad understandings of, 8, 11–­12, 35,
Balkhī), 43, 118, 127 70–­77
Rushdie, Salman, 130, 152 spacing, 70
Ryan, Marie-­Laure, 72–­74, 170 spatial form, 9–­10
spatial theory and literary
Sandy Hook High School reading geography, 8, 12, 16–­17, 23,
event, 139, 157–­58 32, 35, 70, 72–­73, 75–­76,
Saunders, Angharad, 129–­31, 133, 175
173
scale, 35–­36 Tally, Robert, Jr., 174–­75, 177–­78
settings, fictional, 11, 13, 36, 66–­ terminology
67, 71–­72, 77–­84, 107 interdisciplinarity and, 7, 70–­77,
accuracy of, 51–­55, 66–­67, 94
100–­102 literary and spatial, 8, 12, 16,
as factual-­fictional composites, 35–­36
9, 13, 66, 101–­2, 111, 113, “text, the,” 26–­28, 33, 131
116, 123–­26, 172 text as collaborative spatial event, 3,
and simultaneity, 37, 60, 77–­81, 6, 7, 9, 11, 19–­20, 22–­23, 26,
90, 105, 123 32, 52, 59, 67, 69, 84, 103,
space-­time complexity of, 56–­ 123, 146, 150, 179–­80
57 Thacker, Andrew, 171
Sharp, Joanne, 22, 130, 152–­53, third space, 9, 13, 66, 119, 123
177 Thrift, Nigel, 24, 33

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 Index 215

TLC Book Tours, 145, 149–­50 Tuan, Yi-­Fu, 75

Tompkins, Jane, 27–­29, 132, 152 twin towers, World Trade Center,
To Reach The Clouds (Philippe 1–­6, 42–­43, 47, 58, 99, 103,
Petit), 2, 103, 108–­10 107–­9, 122–­23, 125, 132
TransAtlantic, 16, 25, 26, 179 Twitter, 33
reader comments on, 180–­82
translations and translators, 7, 15, Westphal, Bertrand, 170, 173–­75,
145–­46, 148, 150, 173–­74, 177

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177, 179, 182 Wright, J. K., 84

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