Social Heterogeneity and Narrative Techniques -  A Dialogic Reading of Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

Rasheed, Fizza

Social Heterogeneity and Narrative Techniques - A Dialogic Reading of Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

Summary

This paper does an analysis of the narrative techniques employed in the novel Let the Great World Spin. The paper argues that McCann in this novel breaks away with traditional narrative modes to evolve a narrative structure that makes it possible for multiple voices to co-exist and contest within the text. The paper makes use of Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism for such a study. The key concepts of polyphony, heteroglossia, carnivalesque and ambivalence have been employed in this regard. The paper first establishes that the narrative structure of the text makes room for an exploration of social heterogeneity to exist within the immediate context of the novel. This in turn leads to an exploration and analysis of multiple consciousnesses in their separate but inter-linked existence. The paper then outlines the analysis of all the voices in the text under the detailed scrutiny of Bakhtin’s terms of Polyphony and Heteroglossia, identifying its socio-economic dimensions and exploring some of the problems which it generates. The paper uses Bakhtin’s theory of Discourse for an analysis of proliferation of meaning as a result of this social diversity in which every character’s voice is given an equal significance and no voice is prioritized over other. It is argued that Bakhtinian terms of Polyphony, Heteroglossia and Carnivalesque provides us with a potent framework within which to perform such analysis, and this also facilitates us with complete interrogation of the text and engagement with Bakhtin’s theory.The paper then does an analysis of the selected voices by using Bakhtin’s concept of Carnival which tends to present a world with no hierarchical positions in which different voices are heard and interact, breaking down those conventions to enable a genuine dialogue. It creates an alternative social space. As the paper also explores the issue social heterogeneity through the lens of the concept of the Carnival, it argues that the narrative progresses without any authorial dominance in the text and its relevance to the modern world making connections between fact and fiction. It also investigates the centralizing and decentralizing tendencies in the text by using these concepts. It is argued in the conclusion that the dialogic study of the text encourages the revival of suppressed and repressed creative energies. It also provides a new perspective and new order of things by showing the relative nature of all the voices.

Excerpt

explores the issue social heterogeneity through the lens of the concept of the Carnival,

it argues that the narrative progresses without any authorial dominance in the text and

its relevance to the modern world making connections between fact and fiction. It

also investigates the centralizing and decentralizing tendencies in the text by using

these concepts. It is argued in the conclusion that the dialogic study of the text

encourages the revival of suppressed and repressed creative energies. It also provides

a new perspective and new order of things by showing the relative nature of all the

voices. The text, thus, negates the fixed notion of hierarchies and symbolizes the idea

of being universal and belonging to all the people.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

There is neither a first word nor a last word. The contexts of

dialogue are without limit. They extend into the deepest past and the

most distant future. Even meanings born in dialogues of the remotest

past will never be finally grasped once and for all, for they will

always be renewed in later dialogue. At any present moment of the

dialogue there are great masses of forgotten meanings, but these will

be recalled again in the dialogue when it will be given new life. For

nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will someday have its

homecoming festival. (Problems of Speech Genres 170)

Judith Davidson rightly describes the present era as an era of reading in his

"Bakhtin as a Theory of Reading". For reading has become an essential part of every

walk of life. Different fields in our society deal with creating and analysing texts and

for this purpose many theories of reading have also been presented by literary critics

and theorists. In literature, the need of these theories increases for there are a lot many

texts which are being read and analysed everyday by researchers and scholars all over

the world. At a surface level, theory of reading works in three categories, it discusses

the role of language and thought and their relationship with each other, it also places

language at individual and collective levels to analyse them. Moreover it makes

connections between a text, reader and author. The second category is the method of

representation that what are the chief characteristics of the text, how they are

represented and what is the role of author behind this representation. Lastly, there

comes the level of interpretation which deals with the process of various mechanisms

employed by the author through which the readers become capable to extract different

meanings out of the text and analyse it. (2) A novel comprises of many linguistic

genres which are inseparable from one another. Bakhtin says in his book `Discourse

in the Novel' that "The novel as a whole is a phenomenon multiform in style and

variform in speech and voice. In it the investigator is confronted with several

heterogeneous stylistic unities, often located in different linguistic levels and subject

to different stylistic controls (261). The different linguistic genres include different

writing styles which a writer incorporates in his writing and the use of different

voices in the work. The term heteroglossia coined by Bakhtin also points towards the

presence and co-existence of numerous voices in the same text. He compares the

heteroglossic novel with that of heteroglossic language. Davidson quotes from

Bakhtin's Discourse in the Novel that, `These distinctive links and interrelationships

between utterances and languages, this movement of the theme through different

languages and speech types, its dispersion into the rivulets and droplets of social

heteroglossia, its dialogication this is the basic distinguishing feature of the stylistics

of the novel (263). Analysing any novel by keeping its heteroglossic nature opens up

various new facets. It eradicates the possibility of singularity and uniformity of

thought and ideas. Rather a polyphonic novel presents many ways to explore the

diversity of different existing ideas of any culture. Thus the novel can be analysed by

focusing on the language which is either spoken or written in the text. McCann's Let

the Great World Spin will be analysed through the use of written ideas and the way

various voices communicate with one another. It will focus on the centrifugal forces

that permeate the text and the functions they perform in the lives of the individuals. In

The Problems of Speech Genres Bakhtin points out that, `Thus at any given moment

of its historical existence, language is heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the

co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past,

between differing epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in

the present, between tendencies, schools, circles and so forth, all given a bodily form.

These `languages' of heteroglossia intersect each other in a variety of ways forming

new socially typifying languages' (291).

Though, here are many voices introduced in the novel with each voice having

its particular ideological stance they often shift from one style of language to the

other, and with the every changing voice the use of language also transforms

according to the social position of that particular individual. This is what Bakhtin

calls `a hybrid construction' as he says in Discourse in the Novel that, "an utterance

that belongs, by its grammatical (syntactic) and compositional markers, to a single

speaker, but that actually contains mixed within it two utterances, two speech

manners, two styles, two languages, two semantic and axiological belief systems'

(304). Davidson also comments on the space between an authoritative unified

language and internally persuasive language in his Bakhtin as a Theory of Reading in

these words. `At one end of the continuum, then, stands authoritative discourse,

distant and spare. At the other end stands internally persuasive discourse, concrete

and tightly interwoven with daily life's events. As you move toward the middle from

either side, discourse shifts in different ways. Along the edges of the contact zone, is

an area where new meanings are generated, new descriptions abound. The ideological

self moves back and forth on this continuum between one's own words and the words

of others, seeking to assimilate or construct meaning. Thus, for Bakhtin, the

development of the self, in its linguistic and cognitive complexity, is closely related,

if not synonymous, to one's ideological development. This development is dynamic

and generative process, not fixed or static.' (6-7)

In this thesis, the primary text Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

will be analysed in the light of these ideas of M.M. Bakhtin, the Russian thinker and

philosopher. Bakhtinian theory of reading, Dialogism, will be used to interpret this

text. As Holquist asserts in Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World:-

In dialogism, the novel is the great book of life, because it celebrates the

grotesque body of the world. Dialogism figures a close relation between

bodies and novels because they both militate against monadism, the illusion of

closed off bodies or isolated psyches in bourgeois individualism, and the

concept of a pristine, closed off, static identity and truth wherever it may be

found. (90)

Colum McCann is an Irish writer of literary fiction. He was born in Dublin,

Ireland and now lives in New York. He is a distinguished Professor of Creative

Writing in the Master of Fine Arts Program at Hunter College, New York. His work

has been published in 35 languages. He has written for New York Times, The Paris

Review, Granta, The Irish Times, The Guardian, The Independent as well as many

other international publications. Colum McCann explores aesthetic, cultural, ethnic,

geographical and social boundaries in his novels. In the process, McCann discusses

his major subject, exile, both geographical and emotional in various ways. The

territory of McCann's work is international in scope and geography; his topics have

ranged from homeless people in the subway tunnels of New York to the Troubles in

Northern Ireland and the effects of 9/11 to a poetic assessment of the life and culture

in Europe. He is known as a writer of style and substance, praised by critics and

readers alike. Among his major influences are Michael Ondaatje, John Berger, Don

DeLillo, E.L Doctorow, Toni Morrison, Edna O'Brien and the Irish novelist Benedict

Kiely.

His stylistic techniques include poetic voice, use of Christian symbolism, Irish

and Classical mythology, inter-textuality, multiple viewpoints, nonlinear plot

structure and the mixture of factual truth and textual truth. Polyphony widens the

novel's geographic, psychological, chronological and stylistic range and it helps to

understand every character's individual perception of the situation. McCann employs

very simple and colloquial language, sentences are pretty short in length but they

effectively contribute to deliver the essence of the subject matter. There is also the

use of other techniques like inter-textuality and pastiche which adds grandeur to his

style and makes it all the more interesting. Temporal distortion in the novels of

McCann presents the psychological and subjective states of every individual

inhabiting USA as foreign other and the effect of this displacement on their

consciousness which is divided between two halves confusing their identity. Another

narrative device employed by McCann in his works is role of memory and

remembrance to highlight the chaos, disorder and instability in the life of modern man

who has lost his faith in religion and all kind of virtues and is living a life in which

universal criteria of belief has been substituted by diversity of perspectives.

The story of the primary text Let the Great World Spin revolves around Philip

Petit's tightrope walk between the Twin Towers on August 7, 1974. At least eleven

characters are adjusted around this day.

The shifting voices and narrative viewpoints

of McCann's eleven protagonists range from an Irish priest with a liberation theology

to a 38 year-old prostitute with a heroin problem and a teen-age daughter who shares

her afflictions; from a wealthy Manhattan socialite and her husband who is a

prominent New York City judge who have just lost a son in the Vietnam war to a

grieving African-American mother from the Bronx projects who has also lost sons to

the war; from an artist Lara whose momentary recklessness forms a tragic subplot

into play and a teen-age photographer who captures Petit's breath-taking airborne

artistic ability taken by a passing plane that is the novel's great foreshadowing. The

final chapter of McCann's great Irish American novel is set in 2006, thirty-two years

after Petit's tight-rope walk and half a decade after the Twin Towers collapse, in a

post-Hurricane Katrina America where deep scepticism is the order of the day and

mothers still bewail their sons as Claire does and daughters by thousands of mothers

in fact, lost to wars thousands of miles away. The author makes connections between

the two temporal states again through the characters of tightrope walker and Corrigan.

Most of the characters linked by their propinquity to Petit's walk and to each other are

either dead or dying. The narrating voice of the McCann's concluding chapter is one

of those orphaned daughters, the one who is brought up by Gloria and work in the

world which provides less or almost no profit to her, a company working for disaster

relief. Her perspective on the famous photograph taken on the day of her mother's

death corroborates all the incongruent threads of the narrative with its spinning

centrifugal force. A man is up high in the air while a plane passes by; as if going

through the edge of the building as if the walking man is in some way predicting what

would come later. This is the infringement of time and history and also the conflicting

point of several individual stories. The plane passes while the tightrope walker gets to

the end of the wire. Later, as Jaslyn visits the bedside of her dying patron she offers

her comfort thinking: "We stumble on, bring a little noise into the silence, and find in

others the ongoing of ourselves. It is almost enough The world spins. We stumble on.

It is enough" (349). This is how McCann has tried to show the individual perspectives

of every character living in America which has assumed a globalized status. The

novel circles around eleven characters that influence one another by their individual

concepts of religion, identity and social status. It also highlights the life of Corrigan

who is an Irish by descent and is practicing as a priest in New York. McCann

describes his dilemma in the novel as, "I'm supposed to be a man of God but hardly

ever mention Him to anyone. Not to the girls even. I keep these thoughts to myself.

For my own peace of mind. The ease of my conscience. If I started them thinking out

loud all the time I think I'd go mad. But God listens back. Most of the time. He does."

(30) Corrigan is a kind of person who wants other people's pain and he doesn't want

to deal with his own. He is the one whose life is connected with all the characters

either directly or indirectly. Though his miserable life suggests the troubles and

sufferings of displacement, yet his attempt to adjust himself in a completely different

environment shows the quest on his part to improve his life by extending a helping

hand to everyone irrespective of their colour and social identity. He is the one who

looks at this world with all its filth and poverty yet still believes that one day the

submissive might actually win it.

In this research paper I will analyze the text as a Dialogic narrative by

employing the techniques introduced by Bakhtin's theory of Dialogics to further

explore social diversity.

At first, the paper tries to justify the narrative techniques

used in the text and tries to differentiate various methods of narration that makes the

text distinguished from other contemporary works. For this purpose I would make use

of Bakhtinian concepts like polyphony and heteroglossia. In literature, polyphony is a

feature of narrative, which includes diversity of points of view and voices. The

concept was introduced by Mikhail Bakhtin which is based on the musical concept of

polyphony. Bakhtin defines Polyphony in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics as:-

A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousness

rather plurality of consciousness with equal rights and each with its

own world combined but are not merged in the unity of the

event.(6)

Bakhtin claimed that polyphony and heteroglossia are the significant

characteristics of the novel as a literary genre. Although first-person and third-person

narratives are most common literary genres in modern literature, yet novels featuring

multi-voiced narratives also play an important role. The novels, in which there are

multiple narrators, demonstrate the mutual influence and interplay of multiple voices.

Because one of the most common and important goal of polyphony is to portray the

development of characters i-e their identity and subjectivity thus expanding their

worldview which is quite visible in case of McCann. Multi-voiced narration also

highlights question of power by constructing multifaceted network of character

relationships that challenges these characters in the form of social hierarchies. Multi-

voiced narratives allow for a more comprehensive investigation of the opposing

ideologies and demonstrate the ways in which various points of view influence and

are influenced by each other. McCann has made use of this technique in most of his

works like TransAtlantic and This Side of Brightness to elaborate the plurality of

consciousness of the characters which enable the readers to understand the

development of characters as they appear in the context of their inter-relations. As

Qian Zhongwen describes in his "Problems of Bakhtin's Theory about Polyphony"

that polyphonic narrative mainly deals with the heroes in any work of fiction (779).

As Bakhtin states in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics:-

The Dostoevskian "hero has his own ideological authenticity and, meanwhile,

has an independent nature; he might be regarded as a creator who possessed his own

complete ideology." Secondly, the "polyphonic" phenomenon also relates to the

relationship between the hero and his author. The hero, to Bakhtin's mind, "is not the

object through which the author manages to issue his speech (28); which means that

hero's interaction with himself and the world is of equal importance as that of the

author himself. The novels in which polyphonic narrative is used are mostly very

complicated because they have profundity of ideas and they also present self-analysis

of the characters which is quite different from other ordinary monologic narratives

which are completely dominated by their authors. As Voloshinov defines it in

Marxism and the Philosophy of Language as, the monologic utterance is after all;

already an abstraction any monologic utterance is an inseverable element of verbal

communication. Any utterance the finished, written utterance not accepted makes

response to something and is calculated to be responded to in turn. It is but one link in

a continuous chain of speech performances (72). Bakhtin also justifies this in

Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics that polyphonic narratives tend to produce "the

hero who could embody a kind of special view of both the world and himself, the

hero who could embody the standpoint of human beings' thinking and comment on

themselves and the relationship between them and the surrounding reality" (82).

These characters have many contradictory ideas and they act as one of the

representatives of the living generation. Polyphonic narration "is a sort of all-

embracing phenomenon, it seeps into all languages, all relationships as well as

manifestations of human life, and permeates all the significant and valuable fields"

(77).

The primary text will be analysed under the theoretical framework of some

other Bakhtinian concepts like Carnivalesque, Ambivalence and their relation with

Dialogism.

I believe in the democracy of story-telling," said McCann in an interview to

Catherine Dunne. "I love the fact that our stories can cross all sorts of borders

and boundaries. I feel humbled by the notion that I'm even a small part of the

literary experience. I grew up in a house, in a city, in a country shaped by

books. I don't know of a greater privilege than being allowed to tell a story,

or to listen to a story. They're the only thing we have that can trump life

itself. (1)

The third chapter tends to examine the primary text Let the Great World Spin

as a polyphonic novel by using Bakhtinian theoretical concepts like Dialogism,

Polyphony and Heteroglossia. This will highlight how the characters enjoy complete

freedom to argue with each other and even with their author. According to David

Lodge, a polyphonic novel is a "novel in which a variety of conflicting ideological

positions are given a voice and set in play both between and within individual

speaking subjects, without being placed and judged by an authoritative authorial

voice" (After Bakhtin 86). This will also explore the process by which meaning is

evolved out of interactions among the author, the work and the reader; also how these

elements are influenced by the context in which they are placed i-e the social and

ideological forces that are influencing them.

Lewis Bagby defines Bakhtin and his contributions as a critic and theorist in

his "Mikhail Bakhtin's Discourse Typologies: Theoretical and Practical

Considerations" as Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1898-1975) is currently one of the

most respected thinkers in Soviet literary criticism of the twentieth century. His

concise knowledge of world literature, his understanding towards historical continuity

in art and his ability to establish specifically unfathomable relationships between the

author, text, and the reader suggests that he is a great writer. Bakhtin's persistent

interest in language, poetics, and aesthetics and their interconnectedness has

influenced many critics in the late 1920s and early 1930s when he was most

productive, even his popularity is not diminished in the modern times as well. Soviet

publications of Bakhtin's work in the early 1960s reflect a desire to examine the

man's complete works and to follow the development of his ideas. Bakhtin had

developed a full- fledged philosophy of language which represents a specific and

relatively restricted application of his general theory of language. (35)

The works of Bakhtin that are considered landmarks in literary criticism are

Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, The Dialogic Imagination and Rabelais and His

World. The Dialogic Imagination contains an elaboration of the idea of "polyphony"

originally proposed in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. In a sense, these two books

can be considered as providing a systematic development of Bakhtin's philosophy of

language which further helps to understand social heterogeneity. Polyphony is

basically "a new theory of authorial point of view" propounded by Bakhtin (Clark

and Holquist 3). According to David Lodge, a polyphonic novel is a "novel in which

a variety of conflicting ideological positions are given a voice and set in play both

between and within individual speaking subjects, without being placed and judged by

an authoritative authorial voice". The multi-voiced nature of fiction allows different

ideological perspectives to enter the novel. (After Bakhtin 86). As already mentioned,

the peculiarity of a polyphonic novel is that the characters are absolutely free from

authorial control. The voice of the author is here never dominant and the characters

"answer back" with great freedom. Bakhtin describes in Problems of Dostoevsky's

Poetics that he is a thoroughly "self-conscious" being capable of commenting on

himself and on his surroundings (50). By "self-consciousness" Bakhtin means the

capacity of a person to comprehend reality about oneself as well as others out of

which one forms oneself. It is the self consciousness of the polyphonic hero that helps

him stand apart from other monologic heroes. This polyphonic "anti-hero" struggles

against any sort of literary definition by the author or reader. It is with his self-

consciousness he is capable of jolting the finalizing definitions of his selfhood by

others. Thus the polyphonic novel deconstructs the finalized image of an "embodied"

hero in monologic texts. In other words, the reader here meets a fully self-conscious

hero who is allowed maximum independence for a full flowering of his self-

consciousness instead of the "stable and fixed hero of the monologic type" (51).

McCann has shown how fiction can help us acknowledge the fact that, in the

course of cultural history, transformations of time concepts and spatial

representations reflect radical changes in cultural attitudes and lived experience.

Literature, then, is not merely an ideational phenomenon, but has to be considered as

a unique instrument that concerns intellectual, imaginative and emotional attitudes.

What a novel offers is unresolved argon of ideological points of view, sometimes

given voice to by particular characters, in which the `truth' is always suspended and

delayed. As Bakhtin puts it in Discourse in the Novel, each "human being in the novel

is first, foremost, and always a speaking human being" (336), each "bringing with

them their own unique ideological discourse, their own language" (332).

The novel under discussion, as an intentional hybridisation of languages,

creates an image of the various sociolects which exist in competition with each other,

which serves to sharpen the reader's perception of such socio-linguistic

differentiations. The plot of the novel represents and opposes individuals, their

discourses and the world views that they imply. Thus, according to Bakhtin the result

is that the novel is a literary hybrid, an "artistically organised system for bringing

different languages in contact with one another" (361) without offering any resolution

or transcendence of these competing perspectives. The paper also looks into the

anatomy of the text to argue the points which make social diversity possible in the

text. For this purpose, concepts of heteroglossia and ambivalence are employed.

In the book Dialogism; Bakhtin and his World, Michael Holquist defines the

concept of heteroglossia in these words; `heteroglossia is a situation, the situation of a

subject surrounded by the myriad responses he or she might make at any particular

point, but anyone of which must be framed in a specific discourse selected from the

teeming thousands available. Heteroglossia is a way of conceiving the world as made

of a rolling mass of languages, each of which has its own distinct formal markers'

(69). Thus, this paper thoroughly investigates the complex structure of social

diversity in the text and throws ample light on the unique and masterful use of

narrative techniques which help to understand McCann's works and expand the

horizon of literary criticism.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

My research is based on the investigation of the narrative techniques that tend

to converge and congregate the truth both in fiction and in fact through the analysis of

primary text Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann by using the theory of

Discourse and Dialogics presented by Bakhtin. For this purpose I would make use of

Qualitative Research Methodology, applying critical, analytical and evaluative

techniques to thematically disentangle the various techniques which are employed in

the novel. The text would be the main source of critical and analytical inquiry of

dialogic relations. I also intend to make use of all the secondary resources to

strengthen my argument e.g. the internet and the resource journals.

The research study is divided into five chapters. The first chapter will present

an introduction to the study which outlines the introduction of the primary text and

techniques of narration like discourse and textual analysis along with Bakhtin's

theory of Discourse and Dialogics, background of the study and Research

Methodology. The second chapter will comprise of literature review and it will give

an over-view of the research that has been done up till now on this topic. Third

chapter will discuss the Bakhtinian concept of Polyphony and Heteroglossia as

narrative techniques in relation to the text. Fourth chapter will present a critique of

the concepts of Carnivalesque and Ambivalence employed by McCann to highlight

the capability of the individuals to create an alternate world for them. Such concepts

like polyphonic narration, heteroglossia, ambivalence, nonlinear timeline and denial

of any absolute truth by presenting a deep analysis of every individual widens the

scope of the novel and also relates it with facts. This in-depth study will provide an

insight into the consciousness of each character and the way these characters and their

battling voices open up new dimensions in the novel and in fiction generally. Fifth

chapter will present results and findings of this study to conclude this research.

Chapter 2

Literature Review

Literature is a trustworthy and reliable conglomeration of human creative,

inventive and innovative abilities. It serves as a dependable medium through which a

writer presents his intellectual creativity and vision. It also helps to extract and

assume multiple interpretations and elucidations according to the mindset of the

readers.

In Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann has discussed the issue of social

heterogeneity and its outcomes by masterfully sketching eleven lifelike and life-size

characters. He has presented this by dividing his main plot into two temporal states i-

e the first half of the plot is set in the time of 1970s and the later one in 2006 thus

making connections between the two and making ample scope for the main theme of

social heterogeneity to work which leads to an analysis of every character's

consciousness through the accurate use of narrative techniques. This thesis uses

Bakhtin's theory of Discourse for an analysis of proliferation of meaning as a result

of this social diversity in which every character's voice is given an equal significance

and no voice is prioritized over other. It is argued that Bakhtinian terms of

Polyphony, Heteroglossia and Carnivalesque provides us with a potent framework

within which to perform such analysis, and this also facilitates us with complete

interrogation of the text and engagement with Bakhtin's theory. It is argued in the

conclusion that the dialogic study of the text encourages the revival of suppressed and

repressed creative energies. It also provides a new perspective and new order of

things by showing the relative nature of all the voices. The text, thus, negates the

fixed notion of hierarchies and symbolizes the idea of being universal and belonging

to all the people. It intends to explore equal social heterogeneity without any authorial

dominance in the text and its relevance to the modern world making connections

between fact and fiction. It will also investigate the centralizing and decentralizing

tendencies in the text by using Bakhtinian concepts.

The story of the novel revolves around almost a dozen of characters each trying to

display his peculiar stance and also his social stature. All of them are tied together by

a single creative event of wire walking. The concept of Polyphony helps describe

these characters with their individual ideology, thinking and set of mind. It also gives

voice to their particular quandaries and dilemmas and their suppressed feelings which

are the cause of anxiety for them in their everyday life. Thus Polyphony not only

makes possible the presentation of multiple voices in the text but also it serves as a

tool to portray social heterogeneity through these numerous voices. It also provides

an opportunity to these voices to appear in equilibrium, in a way that each voice is

given a balance and symmetrical space to exist and no voice is prioritized over the

other. The novel creates space for different voices to interact which in turn refer to

larger phenomena; it tends to encompass the whole universe. The novel in microcosm

explains the issues of social heterogeneity and the struggle between the centralizing

and decentralizing energies of society which are applicable to any society of any time.

Thus, the novel is a medium through which the author has tried to address

macrocosmic issues. The fictional characters give voice to their hardships, adversities

and their joys making connection with the factual people. McCann has merged the

facts with fiction and his novel can be rightly called `faction'.

Joel Lovell comments in his article `Colum McCann's Radical Empathy' that

McCann has created a kind of radical empathy in his works of fiction. McCann has

formed an organization called Narrative 4, there are children from various races and

locations and they tell stories of their particular regions and after that try to relate

them to a broader perspective. This is what McCann's fiction is all about. He gathers

different stories in a single place to stand them in parallel with the broader scenario.

(n.pag.) Colum McCann describes the motive behind this book in his article `But

Always Meeting Ourselves' as:-

The book carried me through to the far side of my body, made me alive in

another time. Vladimir Nabokov once said that the purpose of storytelling is

"to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of

future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only

posterity will discern and appreciate in far-off times when every trifle of our

plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the

times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be

dressed up for an elegant masquerade." This is the function of book -- we

learn how to live even if we weren't there. Fiction gives us access to a very

real history. Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to

become the other we never dreamed we could be." (n. pag.).

In an interview with Bret Anthony Johnston about the novel Let the Great World

Spin, McCann says:-

I suppose the novel itself is a contemplation of what it means for life to be

unfinished. Things spin. We are made by what we have been, and at the same

time we become what we desire. This past and present is braided together with

a beauty and an uncertainty. But to answer on a practical level even though

the book takes place primarily in 1974 so much of it began for me very

shortly after 9/11. I had read Paul Auster's collection of essays The Red

Notebook, where he wrote about Phillipe Petit scribbling his name across the

sky between the World Trade Centre towers. Then when the towers came

down in 2001 the tightrope walk popped out of my memory, one of those

eureka moments, and I thought, what a spectacular act of creation, to have a

man walking in the sky, as opposed to the act of evil and destruction of the

towers disintegrating. The same image ran true for a number of people, not

least of course Phillipe Petit himself. And I wanted to write a song of my

adopted city as well, and maybe to confront some things that were on my

mind about issues of faith and recovery and belonging. (n. pag.).

He further says about his writing technique employed in the novel that he

writes while pushing the ideas together and by pulling them apart and by breaking the

sentences and then reconnecting them. He has no idea where these voices come from,

he further says that he teaches at Hunter College in New York and what he tells his

students is that he cannot teach them anything, that it is all about `desire, stamina and

perseverance' because these are the things that can saturate their inner talent. He also

tells them not to write about just those things which they know but encourages them

to write about those things which they want to know. He also talks about his personal

liking for the characters; he likes the thirty-eight year old hooker Tillie and Claire, the

grieved mother living in Park Avenue and most of all he is fond of Corrigan. He

thinks that they are the real characters and he can meet them anytime he wants. He

quotes a line from Anna Akhmatova who says in a poem `The Evening Light is Broad

and Yellow' that `You're late. Too many years have passed, how glad I am to see

you' (n.pag.). He says that it is a great privilege for a writer that he extends his life

through the medium of writing. This is how a writer continues to exist by creating

another body, language is such a unit which has infinite possibilities and the writer

can best utilize such possibilities.

A man a quarter of a mile in the sky. But the further the novel goes along, the

less important the tightrope walk becomes, until it disappears from sight

altogether, and the thing that holds the novel together is the very low tightrope

of human intention that we all negotiate. Some of us walk very close to the

ground, but we can hit it awful hard. We are all, in the end, funambulists."

(n.pag.).

Though his novel is not particularly about 9/11 yet there are so many

references in the novel which allude towards that incident. The novel basically is a

complete fender-bender of the personal and the public. McCann says, "Then came the

moment when I thought that I could go backwards in time to talk about the present:

that's when the tightrope walk came in. And the deeper I got into the novel the more I

began to see that it was, hopefully, about an act of recovery. Because the book comes

down to a very anonymous moment in the Bronx when two little kids are coming out

of a very rough housing project, about to be taken away by the state, and they get

rescued by an act of grace. That's it, not much maybe, but everything to me. And

there's hardly a line in the novel about 9/11, but it's everywhere if the reader wants it

to be. I trust my readers. They will get from a book what they want. It can be read in

many different ways. In this sense I hope it works on an open poetic level: make of

this child what you will." (n.pag.).

Jonathan Mahler in his article "The Soul of a City" discusses the novel with its

manifold aspects in this way:-

The walk is really little more than a cultural touchstone and a literary conceit,

the event around which McCann has assembled his cast. But the metaphorical

possibilities of the walker -- the paradox of this innocent, unsanctioned act of

"divine delight" being carried out between two buildings that would one day

be so viciously and murderously destroyed -- are hard to ignore, particularly

in a novel so concerned with the twin themes of love and loss. (n.pag.).

Mahler further comments on the writing style of McCann that he continuously

changes his speed while writing and there are also multi voices and narrative styles in

the text. His narration of the prostitute is in first person narrative which renders it a

lifelike quality. McCann's description of Claire and Solomon is far more real and

original; the way they are dealing with the grief after the sad demise of their only son.

Mahler comments that:-

It is a mark of the novel's soaring and largely fulfilled ambition that McCann

just keeps rolling out new people, deftly linking each to the next, as his story

moves toward its surprising and deeply affecting conclusion. In a loose sense,

what connects everyone in this novel is the high-wire walker; the day of his

stunt is a pivotal one in all of their lives. But they are bound more powerfully

by something else: grief. "Let the Great World Spin" is an emotional tour de

force. It is a heartbreaking book, but not a depressing one. Through their

anguish, McCann's characters manage to find comfort, even a kind of

redemption. (n.pag.).

James Buchan discusses the same thing in his review of Let the Great World Spin as:-

Here he deploys a technique, much used in commercial

fiction

, in which

characters are invented and manipulated to converge on a single point of space

and history Almost all novels are improved by cutting from the top. On their

first pages, authors parade those favorite effects which disgust the impartial

reader. McCann's first chapter reads like Time magazine at its most solemn

and sentimental. The story proper, as in so many novels, begins some way into

the second chapter. In assembling his characters for their meeting with Petit

and destiny, McCann must also relate their history up to that famous day. For

all the troubled saintliness of Corrigan, or the numb fragility of Claire

Soderberg, this approach, repeated 10 times, is a little monotonous. McCann

describes Petit's walk both in prose lyric and also in dialogue. (n.pag.).

What Bakhtin has discussed about the concepts of dialogism, polyphony,

heteroglossia and Carnivalesque and how they are useful as well as applicable to the

text will be elaborated now.

While inquiring into the peculiar nature of the novel and its discourse versus

other literary genres, Bakhtin constructs an approach, or rather, a philosophical stance

describing humans and their words. He understands language as primary in our lives:

it connects humans to one another throughout history because it transforms reality

and it shapes our experience; it claims ideas with utterance. The word "becomes

`one's own' only when the speaker populates it with his own intentions."(Dialogic

293)

Dialogism is an umbrella term which covers these concepts of Polyphony,

Heteroglossia and Carnivalesque. Michael Holquist describes the significance of

dialogue in Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World in this way; "Bakhtin insists on

differences that cannot be overcome: separateness and simultaneity are basic

conditions of existence Bakhtin attempts to use the situation of dialogue as a means

for getting around traditional limitations of ideas of the subject. Dialogism argues that

all meaning is relative in the sense that it comes about only as a result of the relation

between two bodies occupying simultaneous but different space, where bodies may

be thought of as ranging from the immediacy of our physical bodies, to political

bodies and to bodies of ideas in general" (20-21).

Andrew Robinson discusses the concept of dialogism in relation with

polyphony, heteroglossia and Carnivalesque in his article published in Ceasefire

Magazine.

Dialogism involves a particular ethic which can be applied politically and in

everyday life. On the one hand, it is a refusal of closure: it opposes the fixation on

any particular monologue. On the other hand, it also refuses dominant liberal forms of

coexistence and tolerance. Bakhtin's vision is not one of an empty juxtaposition of

opinions, or a flattening-out of discourse so that all perspectives are equivalent.

Different perspectives are not partial, complementary truths. Rather, the dynamic

interplay and interruption of perspectives is taken to produce new realities and new

ways of seeing. It is incommensurability which gives dialogue its power. This is a

particular kind of discourse of fundamental rights, taken outside a liberal frame. A

Bakhtinian dialogical right, like Foucauldian rights, is a right to a process, to self-

activity in the formation of one's perspective not a question of an outcome, or a

formal right in a particular system. It is recognized only when all subjects are able to

speak and act autonomously. This position will be denied by those who insist that an

objective reality can be specified, separately from perspectives (for example,

positivists and orthodox Marxists). It will also be denied by those who believe

scarcity is ineliminable, and relations among perspectives are necessarily mediated by

power (for instance, International Relations Realists and Lacanians/Laclauians). For

Lacanians, the fact of dialogism is fundamentally traumatic, and the monologic

gesture of imposing a master-signifier becomes a means to produce a minimum of

social order and self-identity. A Bakhtinian utopia would be a space of abundance of

dialogue, of coexistence of differences, of the absence of any overarching regulation

of the free self-actualization of different perspectives. It would be something like a

permanent carnival." (n. pag.).

According to Andrew Robinson a dialogical work is continually informed by

other works and voices, and tries to alter or update it. It illustrates the history of

meanings associated with each word, phrase and genre. Every word is said in reaction

to other statements and in expectation of upcoming statements. This style of

language-use is, according to Bakhtin, `typical of everyday language-use'. When used

in novels it truthfully represents the reality of language-use. He says, "The dialogical

word is always in an intense relationship with another's word, being addressed to a

listener and anticipating a response. Because it is designed to produce a response, it

has a combative quality (e.g. parody or polemic). It resists closure or unambiguous

expression, and fails to produce a `whole'. It is a consciousness lived constantly on

the borders of other consciousnesses". For Bakhtin, monological statement is an

altered form of an original dialogism. All signifying performances (i.e. use of

language and symbols) have eventually dialogical purpose. Human consciousness is

not a cohesive entity, but is always discordant between various consciousnesses; a

single consciousness separated from contact with other consciousnesses is simply

unfeasible. Because, a single consciousness is always constructed by reactive

connections and it cannot exist in seclusion. According to Robinson, (If someone

offers counter-examples of hermits or psychological difference, it should be noted

that such people are still in dialogue with their ecological surroundings, with nature,

with multiple inner voices... there is no reason to presume that dialogism stops

working at the borders of the inter-human). However, language-use can take full

advantage of this dialogical nature and also minimize or limit it. (n.pag.).

Thus, dialogism offers different perspectives on the same world; it includes

the circulation of absolutely irreconcilable rudiments `within different perspectives of

equal value'. Bakhtin criticizes the observation that dissimilarity means that one of

the people must be wrong because many viewpoints exist in the world and legitimacy

requires `many incommensurable voices'. Therefore, it involves a world which is

primarily `irreducible to unity'. Separateness and simultaneity are there everlastingly

and there is no single meaning to be found in the world, but an infinite `multitude of

contesting meanings'. Reality is recognized by the way we address, engage and make

commitments in a particular circumstance. In a fully dialogical world-view, the

structure of the text should itself be subsidiary to the fact that all characters must be

treated as subjects rather than objects. In this context a novel is constructed as a `great

dialogue among unmerged perspectives'. In such a novel, ideas are not presented

generally, but are `concretely embodied in the lives of protagonists'. That is how

dialogical texts presents relations as dialogical rather than as objects, and circumvent

authorial dominance. (n.pag.).

According to Bakhtin, dialogism illustrates the entire social world. As

genuine human life is in the form of open-ended dialogue likewise the world merges

into an open-ended, multi-voiced, dialogical whole. It becomes a world of many

worlds, all of them are equally capable of expressing themselves and they are free to

conceptualize their objects. Bakhtin emphasizes that it is not enough to simply

understand the other's perspective but we should look at it from external standpoint if

we want it to produce or construct something new and enriching. A novel can become

a meeting place of heteroglossia because it can represent multiple speech-genres. It

can thus represent the discussion of a time-period to fully understand the various

perspectives and their relation with each other. A dialogical novel reveals and

relativises linguistic borders, making discourse travel across them. (n.pag).

What McCann has presented is the conglomeration of various battling voices

in the text and this composition can be analyzed by focusing on the language they

use. Language of every character is representative of his/her ideas and thinking. This

very thinking and ideology is conveyed to us through the medium of language; the

manner in which they converse with each other establishes a dialogic relation. As

Simon Dentith describes the same thing in his Bakhtinian Thought: An Introductory

Reader, "Language appears here as the site or space in which dialogic relationships

are realized; it manifests itself in discourse, the word oriented towards other." (34) He

continues referring Bakhtin to strengthen his point as "Language offered by Bakhtin

is `sociological' the shift into the world of social values is made through `evaluative

accent' and hence ideology; since all use of language is interlocutory, that is they

occur between people, it follows that they all are ideological." (34)

In Dentith's opinion a polyphonic novel presents a struggle between different

voices and this competition of voices helps to understand the heteroglossic nature of

the novel. In the novel under discussion Let the Great World Spin McCann has

presented a struggle between some twelve voices striving for social `freedom' that is

to create a relative world for them. Bakhtin introduces two terms in this context;

authoritative discourse and internally persuasive discourse. Authoritative discourse is

defined by Dentith as "Which may not be challenged, and so has the status of taboo;

it seeks to withdraw beyond dialogue, to surround itself with an uncrossable

exclusion zone. Such discourse may only enter consciousness whole and entire . . ."

(57). We see such type of commanding and solid discourse in case of Corrigan, who

lives throughout his life in a continuous struggle with his Religious priorities and his

personal demands. Religion remains a dominating and unchallengeable force for him.

Laws of society and accepted behaviorism can also be treated as authoritative

discourse which is exploited and transgressed by Claire Soderberg in the novel. She

creates a relative world of merriment and jollity for herself which overpowers the

ruling cruel world. Same is the case with the tightrope walker who challenges the

outer world by giving superiority to his internal voice. He enforces his ideology

through his brave act, subduing the laws and customs of the New York City. All these

characters are motivated by their internal persuasive discourse:-

Which is in a constant state of renegotiation, flux and extension. The

internally persuasive word starts out as the word of another, in competition

with other words that have similarly been internalized; the process of

ideological becoming is one in which these different words are more and more

thoroughly assimilated, brought into contact each with the other, made more

thoroughly one's own though never becoming wholly so and thus always

remaining in some sense double-voiced. (57)

The characters represented in the novel are the couriers of their socio-cultural

identity yet there remains something unexplained about them which lead towards

future opportunities.

This is how characters become sociable in the novel. The way they come into

contact with each other and the way this interaction provides them a possibility to

construct a relative world for them is the subject matter of this whole research. To

explore Carnivalesque nature of this text is to justify the statement made by Dentith in

his book Bakhtinian Thought in which he says, "The carnival inversions, the world-

turned-upside-down of these festivities, were clearly not aimed at loosening people's

sense of the rightness of the rules which kept the world right way up, but on the

contrary at reinforcing them." (74) Another aspect of this concept of Carnivalesque is

that it tries to and can be used `as a cover for violent social struggles' (75). It brings

all the social oppositions to light and also shows a simultaneous way to reconcile

these contending forces. The utopian world of Carnivalesque does not point toward a

perfect world but provides a space to live within the life that is being lived by the

characters. Dentith describes this as:-

Carnival becomes a time outside time, `a second life of the people, who for a

time entered the utopian realm of community, freedom, equality and

abundance. The very language that the people speak is altered, to allow a

familiarity and fraternization impermissible at other times. When it enters

writing, the carnival spirit offers liberation from all that is humdrum and

universally accepted and it liberates people not only from external censorship

but first of all from the great interior censor. (76)

What carnival tries to point out are the repressed energies of the people living

in authoritative social environment. The in-depth study of the novel is the justification

of the statement "It does provide a richly suggestive topos, one which condenses

many crucial and highly contested aspects of European history over the last five

centuries: attitudes to the body; popular culture and elite attempts to regulate it;

sexual norms and their transgressions. It reflects the energies that are still engaged in

those various attempts at regulation, contestation and repression. (79)

Similarly, the concept of Heteroglossia when applied to the text brings out the

manner in which these different voices interact with each other. It serves as a

powerful tool to explore the multiplicity of voices and their narration. Every character

in the novel possesses its own particular `zone' and `sphere of influence' over other

characters (214). When a voice crosses its exacting boundary by coming into contact

with other voices, it loses its peculiarity.

According to Dentith, "The area occupied by an important character's voice

must in any event be broader than his `direct' and `actual' words. This zone

surrounding the important characters of the novel is stylistically profoundly

idiosyncratic: the most varied hybrid constructions hold sway in it, and it is always, to

one degree or another, dialogized; inside this area a dialogue is played out between

the author and his characters not a dramatic dialogue broken up into statements and

response, but that special type of novelistic dialogue that realizes itself within the

boundaries of constructions that externally resemble monologues" (214). When

different voices enter and interplay in a novel, they `stratify the linguistic unity of the

novel' (215) and this speech miscellany lead to various new openings in the text.

Thus Heteroglossia defines multiple contending voices and tries to extract new

meanings out of them. "True, even in novel heteroglossia is by and large always

personified, incarnated in individual human figures, with disagreements and

oppositions individualized. But such oppositions of individual wills and minds are

submerged in social heteroglossia, they are reconceptualized through it. Oppositions

between individuals are only surface upheavals of the untamed elements in social

heteroglossia, surface manifestations of those elements that play on such individual

oppositions, make them contradictory, saturate their consciousness and discourses

with a more fundamental speech diversity" (219).

The context of any text is of great importance. "

Context prevails over text. All

texts and parts of any texts constantly shift, slide, slither, and sluice their way toward

meaning. Texts alter `meaning' along with social, physiological, psychological,

historical, socio-economical, religious, and other contexts. When heteroglossia

survives and thrives, no word, phrase, sentence, genre, authority, can be canonized

"written in stone" as commandments. Heteroglossia is life lived; canonization

removes that which is canonized from life. The dialogic imagination - dialogizing - is

a manner of living which acknowledges our tentative and multi-voiced humanity. (35-

36)

As the characters in the novel hooked on communicating with each other the

horizon of research gets vast. It opens up new dimensions and possibilities. We come

to know about the relations and connections between different characters that are

interlinked with each other either knowingly or unknowingly. Bakhtin describes the

same thing in his book The Dialogic Imagination that:-

In all areas of life and ideological activity, our speech is filled to overflowing

with other people's words, which are transmitted with highly varying degrees

of accuracy and impartiality. The more intensive, differentiated and highly

developed the social life of a speaking collective, the greater is the importance

attaching, among other possible subjects of

talk, to another's word, another's utterance, since another's word will be the

subject of passionate communication, an object of interpretation, discussion,

evaluation, rebuttal, support, further development and so on. (337)

To cap up the whole discussion, the open-ended nature of the primary text

renders it a unique and lifelike quality. Every character represented in the novel

possesses its own peculiar stance and ideology which will be explored in the

upcoming chapters. The whole research that has been done up till now on Colum

McCann and his works is basically about the themes of loss and remembrance, to

encounter the memories of every character and mixture of cultural experiences. He is

basically trying to find out the purpose of a life which has undergone a rupture but is

still continuing on the basis of memory and experiences of the people.

But this thesis will justify that along with the themes mentioned above

McCann's novel presents a microcosmic critique of modern problematic and

challenging social network and the way the individuals communicate and form a

relative world for them to subvert and destabilize their exigent lives by the accurate

application of Bakhtinian theory of Discourse. This research will add a new

dimension to study McCann's works. The thesis concentrates on social hierarchies

and the forces that undermine them; it explores only the socio-ideological facets

through the use of narration in the novel's context. It takes the novel into the realm of

Narratology which is another dimension to expand its linguistic worth. McCann is the

first European who has novelized America unironically with the help of his great

imaginative sight. The novel can also be taken as an example of pulp fiction because

it connects the individual stories which are in some way or other connected with each

other. The novel works as a centrifuge presenting a small plot of fiction which

consists of large scale facts and events of everyday life. It also helps us to look at this

world kaleidoscopically to explore the fact that there is no absolute finality in this

world and all of us are equally participating in this. Let the Great World Spin presents

a perfect fusion of context and form. McCann has used quite new and unique

narrative point of view and an exquisite distribution of spatio-temporal order in the

novel. It makes the novel all the more interesting and it helps to understand a new

facet in the traditional narratological manner. There are frequent fissures and shifts in

the narration of different characters like Corrigan, Tillie, Ciaran, Adelita, Claire

Soderberg and Lara which helps to observe the inner sides of these characters. There

is also a superb arrangement of spatio-temporal order in the novel which starts from

1970s and ends somewhere in 2006 but there are continuous non-linear descriptions

in the course of the novel. So far as the spatial arrangement of the novel is concerned,

it presents a stark contrast between New York in 1970s vs. New York in 2006, New

York and Ireland, New York and The Bronx.

Some of the aspects which this dissertation will highlight are: it presents a

detailed account of McCann's novel Let the Great World Spin, discussing all the

characters with their peculiar socio-ideological states. It also focuses on the narrative

techniques like first-person, third-person, and third-person omniscient narrations. The

techniques used by major writers of contemporary American fiction are irony,

playfulness, black humor, inter-textuality, pastiche, meta-fiction, fabulation, temporal

distortion, magic realism, paranoia, maximalism and minimalism. The paper will

argue that McCann breaks away from the prevalent narration styles and experiments

and adopts an atypical style to look deep down in the heart of the consciousnesses of

his characters. It tends to explore different existing voices in the light of Bakhtin's

theory of Dialogics. The concepts of Polyphony, Heteroglossia and Carnival help to

discover the battling co-existence of multiple voices in the text. It will explore the

theme of dialogism in the text which is based on the fact that this text is in form of

dialogue, internal and external; suggesting unfinalisability therefore it is open-ended.

It will present a parallel between the impact of internal dialogues among different

characters and the impression it produces through its relational and dynamic dialogic

stature. This aspect keeps the research from going in the realm of dialectic studies

which is described by Rupert Wegerif as; `

From a dialogic perspective the difference

between voices in dialogue is constitutive of meaning in such a way that it makes no

sense to imagine `overcoming' this difference. By contrast, due to the implicit

assumption that meaning is ultimately grounded on identity rather than upon

difference, the dialectic perspective applied by Vygotsky interprets differences as

`contradictions' that need to be overcome or transcended' (347) which can be further

explored in future. The thesis, thus, contends that McCann's novel represents a

faithful dialogic analysis through its characters as well as from the narrative

techniques that are used in this thesis to explore the underlying interpretations of

multiple voices existing in the novel.

Chapter 3

Polyphonic Narration and Heteroglossia to explore the Anatomy of Multiple

Voices in Let the Great World Spin.

Bakhtin develops his ideas about hetroglossia and polyphony in his book

Discourse in the Novel, published between 1929 and 1936. In this book, Bakhtin

presents a comprehensive theory of the novel which is constructed upon "socially

grounded views of language". His dialogic principle makes connections between

subject and object, form and content. In the very beginning of his essay, Bakhtin

presents the view that novel is an amalgam of socially diverse voices which are all the

time combating with each other and in order to understand the complex nature of the

novel critics must have to alter their opinion about the unitary view of language.

There is a detailed discussion on the complex structure of the novel in the essay and it

concludes defining the role of the author in relation with the features of the novel.

In the first part of his essay, Bakhtin presents an overview of modern literary

criticism which was previously based on "expressive language" presented only the

individual aspects of form and neglected the social background of the text. He offers

a new definition of the novel and its constructive elements;

The novel as a whole is a phenomenon multiform in style and

variform in speech and voice. In it the investigator is confronted with

several heterogeneous stylistic unities, often located in different

linguistic levels and subject to different stylistic controls. (Discourse

in the Novel 261)

There are various discourses which contribute in the making of a novel. There

is author's voice, different everyday speeches, formal and informal discourses of

daily life and individual style of every character. The purpose behind polyphonic

narration is:-

to create the hero who could embody a kind of special view of both the world

and himself, the hero who could embody the standpoint of human beings'

thinking and comment on themselves and the relationship between them and

the surrounding reality (Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics 82).

In his book Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Bakhtin presented the idea of

Polyphony as "plurality of equally valid consciousnesses" in which the word

`consciousnesses' is used to refer to the `characters' in the text. It is to show that the

character "is a man of idea" (85) and that this very idea has "taken control of the

deepest core of the character's personality" (87). The phrase `equally valid' denotes

the negation of authorial dominance which was part and parcel of the previous

monologic texts that were completely dominated by single author and the words or

ideas were just imposed on them or rather put in their mouths by the author and there

was no way for them to act independently.

In Bakhtin's opinion, the Dostoevskian polyphonic "hero has his own

ideological authenticity and, meanwhile, has an independent nature; he might be

regarded as a creator who possessed his own complete ideology." Secondly, the

"polyphonic" phenomenon also relates to the relationship between the hero and his

author. The hero, to Bakhtin's mind, "is not the object through which the author

manages to issue his speech" (28)

Bakhtin insisted on the fact that every character in a text is unique and

irreplaceable. Every character enjoys his uniqueness whether he wants it or not, it is

something which is given to him and the purpose of presenting multiple

consciousnesses is to actualise this uniqueness of each and every character in the text.

Thus a text assumes a position in which different perspectives and ideologies are

intermingled. Plot in Dostoevsky's polyphonic novel is absolutely devoid of any sort

of finalizing foundations. Its goal is to place a person in various situations that expose

and provoke him, to bring people together and make them collide and conflict-in such

a way, however, that they do not remain within this area of plot-related contact but

exceed its bounds. (276- 77) It also covers both objective and subjective nature of

characters. So it is directly opposite from the monological text which is "made up of

objects, integrated through a single consciousness Monologism is taken to close down

the world it represents, by pretending to be the ultimate word" (Andrew Robinson).

Whereas, polyphonic text creates a hero `who as a free man could place himself in an

equal position with his creator, being able to refute the latter's opinions and even

revolt against him.' (28-29)

Let the Great World Spin is a novel which is comprised of several

`consciousnesses' or `characters' whose ideologies and truths are introduced and

interconnected in the text through a major event which is based on a real tightrope

walk of Philip Petit between the twin towers of World Trade Centre back in 1974.

Colum McCann has masterfully captured the spirit of that time and presented the

social life of New York at that time in a lifelike manner. Each of eleven characters

mentioned in the text have their individual ideas and truths and they are connected

with each other knowingly or unknowingly. At the very beginning of the novel, there

is a vivid description of the tightrope walker who is standing at the height of one

hundred and ten stories and is all prepared to walk on the wire which is tied between

the twin towers.

There is a detailed account of his body language which is a clear indicator of

his determination. His act has joined people from every walk of life; there were

"Lawyers. Elevator operators. Doctors. Cleaners. Prep chefs. Diamond merchants.

Fish sellers. Sad-jeaned whores Stenographers. Traders. Delivery boys. Sandwich

board men. Cardsharks a locksmith a bike messenger . . ." (McCann 4). These people

were gathered there and were responding to the act of tightrope walking in their own

way in which they apprehend the reality. Tightrope walker is like magnet whose

charismatic personality has brought these differing `consciousnesses' together on the

same platform. "The man above was a word they seemed to know, though they had

not heard it before" (McCann 7). He thus appears to be a man of predetermined

ideology; the one who wants to affirm his ideological authenticity through his brave

act of tightrope walking. He is a man with an independent nature and he wants to

establish his uniqueness through this very act. He is a man who wants to explore

reality himself without any authorial dictation. The mob is also described according

to their individual ideologies; there is a sense of integrity that is given to them

through the shared act of watching tightrope walker "the air felt suddenly shared" (7).

Their subjective mental states are also delineated as:-

Would he jump, would he fall was he solitary, was he a decoy he was an

Arab, a Jew, a Cypriot, an IRA man, that he was really a publicity stunt, a

corporate scam or that he was a protester and he was going to hang a slogan

(5-6).

The opinion of every character gathered there, has its own validity and carries

its own narrative weight. It is representative of the fact that there is a kind of realistic

mutual social activity going on in which everyone is taking part having his own

particular thinking but at the same time it is not a same experience for everyone.

Though they are witnessing a combine spectacle but they are free to respond to it in

their own way. The complete freedom of every character ensures his individual

existence because if a character fails to possess this independence, he will not

understand the objective reality and as a result it would be difficult for him to exist.

Thus, Philip Pettit's walk serves as a unifying force for all the characters in the

narrative because his aerial act provides a link to every character and joins them in

the story narration.

The next voice introduced in the novel is John Andrew Corrigan, "light-

skinned, dark-haired, blue-eyed" (13). He is described by his brother Ciaran as "he

had no idea that his presence sustained people, made them happy, drew out their

improbable yearnings he just plowed along, oblivious" (14). Thus Ciaran, a narrator

in the novel is a heterodigetic character because he explains to us the events that took

place in the life of Corrigan, forming a broader background of the story. Corrigan is a

narratee who is present inside the text but his life events, thoughts, opinions and

motivations are introduced to us through the third-person narrator. Ciaran knows the

life of Corrigan and is well aware of all the ups and downs of his life. Though at start

when he comes to live with Corrigan and saw his brother caught up in the net of these

social outcasts; he feels sorry for him and advises him to leave the Bronx and go back

to Ireland, but very soon he understands his brother's stance and acknowledges his

devotion and dedication towards the needy of the projects. The readers are given

insight into the life of Corrigan and his thoughts through the narrative voice of Ciaran

whose narrative voice explains the past memories about Corrigan's life in an

unsullied manner and these recollections are not hazy and dubious rather they are

very fresh. Ciaran also serves as a witness of some of the events in his brother's life

and he is a participant of some matters too. His narration provides a background to all

the upcoming events and narrations for the rest of the text is based upon these

characters and their acquaintances. Ciaran's third-person narration sets the beginning

of all the action in the text as he introduces the two towering characters of the text in

his narration i-e Corrigan and Tillie. The very character of Corrigan reminds us of

Jesus Christ for there are sharp allusions in the text that connect him with Christ. His

very traits and morals are a clear indication that he somehow relates with Christ. The

major characteristic of his personality is his deep compassion for the poor, be they are

the oppressed, powerless, outcasts or the people of different races. Corrigan has been

depicted as a priest who aids the hookers of his residential area without any feeling of

revulsion against them. According to New Testament, Jesus also had compassion for

the prostitutes because they were trapped in sin. By helping those destitutes, Corrigan

is might following the saying of Christ which goes in this way:-

If there is a poor man among you, one of your brothers, in any of the towns of

the land which the LORD your God is giving you, you shall not harden your

heart, nor close your hand to your poor brother; but you shall freely open your

hand to him, and generously lend him sufficient for his need in whatever he

lacks. (Deut 15:7)

The very first trait of Corrigan is his helpfulness and selflessness, as his

brother says he was always ready to help the needy who were present there in the

Bronx like drunkards and prostitutes; rejecting the security of his social position of

being a priest.

It was a simple equation to him others needed the blankets more than he,

and he was prepared to take the punishment if it came his way. It was my

earliest suggestion of what my brother would become, and what I'd later see

among the cast-offs of New York the whores, the hustlers, the hopeless all

of those who were hanging on to him like he was some bright hallelujah in the

shitbox of what the world really was. ( McCann15)

As it is also quoted in Bible "For you have been a defense for the helpers, a

defense for the needy in his distress." (Isaiah 25:4) The good side of Corrigan's

nature urged him to help others and this thing was further strengthened by the death

of his mother, when he was seventeen years old. He turned towards God, because he

had lost his belief in his close relations who had left him still he did not want to lose

his hope and the brighter side of his character pushes him towards the fact that he

should not get disappointed for there must be some fruitful lying for him in the future

ahead. "What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the

grime of the everyday" (McCann 20). His ideology is that despite all the ugliness and

the hardships of this world, there is still a room for `small beauties' in life (20). He is

a true follower of Jesus as he never hesitates in helping the poor irrespective of their

social status. As it is quoted in Bible:-

And if you give yourself to the hungry, and satisfy the desire of the afflicted,

then your light will rise in darkness, and your gloom will become like midday.

And the LORD will continually guide you, and satisfy your desire in scorched

places, and give strength to your bones; and you will be like a watered garden,

and like a spring of water whose waters do not fail (Isaiah 58:10).

He proves to be a `self-conscious' hero who is not only aware of his own

reality but also understands the reality of the world around him. He comments about

his surroundings as well as about himself. As Bakhtin describes in Problems of

Dostoevsky's Poetics:-

The hero interests Dostoevsky as a particular point of view on the world and

on oneself, as the position enabling a person to interpret and evaluate his own

self and his surrounding reality. What is important to Dostoevsky is not how

his hero appears in the world but first and foremost how the world appears to

his hero, and how the hero appears to himself. (47)

The life of Corrigan is presented in the novel with all its ups and downs. He is

shown as participating in different activities throughout his life. His dialogues with

his acquaintances and even with strangers are described to show his subjective and

objective point of views. It not only confirms his ideological authenticity but also

justifies his existence in an objective world. As there is no finality of the self, because

it is always in the process of evolution so is the case with the character. There is

always an element of unfinalisability for as a character engages him in social

activities his personality also changes therefore, no fixed and stable definition of the

character is possible. There are other people who have their respective views about

Corrigan besides his brother. Among them are the hookers; Tillie and Jazzlyn, who

reside in the same floor of the slums building in which Corrigan is living. Here again

we find clues of Corrigan's connection with Christ; Corrigan is also merciful towards

these sex workers and his relation with these hookers reminds us of an instance from

the life of Christ. It is mentioned in New Testament Bible that once a person amongst

Pharisees invited Christ to eat. There was a woman who was a prostitute present at

that feast. When she saw Christ she started weeping and "washed His feet with her

tears and wiped them with the hair of her head" (Luke 39). Jesus told the host that

"her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much" (47). Christ also told the

sinner woman that "your faith has saved you. Go in peace" (50). Jazzlyn tells Ciaran

about his brother that "We love him like chocolate. We love him like nicotine Tillie's

got a crush on him." (McCann 29). Despite all the filth of their wayward life,

Corrigan still has a soft corner for them. To him, "they are good people. They just

don't know what it is they are doing" (29).

At one hand, Corrigan is completely aware of his surroundings; he not only

adjusts himself but also justifies his awareness of these stark realities. On the other

hand, he is also a keen observer of his own self and often comments on his individual

ideology in front of his brother. He says, "I'm supposed to be a man of God but I

hardly ever mention Him to anyone I keep these thoughts to myself. For my own

peace of mind. The ease of my conscience" (30). The problem with Corrigan is that

he wants to live with other people's miseries and hardships in order to forget his own.

This is the reason that he provides whores with all the possible facilities and they love

him back. But Ciaran takes it as their greed and hypocrisy; he is of the view that these

hookers are using his brother and his goodness for their own benefit. He expresses his

disgust for them as:-

Step into that river, you don't step out. How disgusting they were, sucking on

his blood, all of them, leaving him thin, dry, helpless, taking the life out of

him, leeches, worse than leeches, bedbugs that crawled from the wallpaper, he

was a fool all his religiosity, all his pious horse-shit, it came down to

nothing, the world is vicious and that's what it amounts to, and hope is

nothing more or less than what you can see with your own bare eyes. (39)

McCann has successfully delineated the subjective nature of Corrigan and the

objective consciousnesses around him. All the characters that are acquainted or linked

somehow with Corrigan are free to express their words and ideas according to the

situation they are put in. A hindrance comes between him and his bond with God

which can also be called a rupture in his pious and innocent easy-going life is his

falling in love with Adelita, a non- Catholic, nurse by profession. He tries very hard

to avoid her but fails. He continually keeps himself reminding that "strengthen

yourself against this, this is a test, be ready, be ready" (51). This is because he does

not want to lose his faith and belief in God. He compares his condition to a person

who has fallen from height and has lost his innocence. As Corrigan says, "I'm

descending, sinking like a hopeless swimmer. And I'm saying, God don't allow this

to happen But it was so pleasant. I wanted to keep my eyes closed and pry them open

at the same time." (51) His consciousness and his dilemmas are described to us in a

realistic manner and from multiple points of views. With every changing voice his

personality also undergoes a change and a new layer is added to his character. With

his individual thinking he confirms his presence among other characters and his

connection with other people around him makes him understand the fact that other

have their own validity of opinion and he is one among them. He says:-

I don't even judge myself by my actions. I judge myself by what's in my

heart. And it's rotten because it wants to own things, but it's not rotten

because it's the most content I've ever been, and it's the most content she's

ever been too you know my vows. I used to think there was no other man in

me, no other person, just me, the devoted one and maybe it's not even a matter

of losing faith. (55)

Corrigan's life-long devotion to God enabled him to see a brighter side of

everyone, be it pious or not. His interaction with Adelita makes him understand that

though she is non- Catholic yet she understands the rules of being in Order. She also

accepts things with an open heart. And in the depths of his heart, Corrigan knows that

`she had an interior order, and for all her toughness there was a beauty that rose easily

to the surface' (64-65).

Ciaran continues to comment on the condition of his brother. His words carry

weight because he is an individual having his own place in narrative because of his

personal way of thinking and engagement with other characters. His ties with his

religion are not strong enough but by living among those prostitutes and destitute of

Bronx; he is somewhat able to understand the reason that which forces his brother to

stay among them. He feels sympathy for his younger brother who has devoted himself

for the betterment of these needy people. He says "yet nothing was simple, certainly

not simplification. Poverty, chastity, obedience he had spent his life in fealty to

them, but was unarmed when they turned against him" (67). He was sure of the thing

that Adelita is the best choice for his brother for she will help him to find his God.

The time when he was drawing this conclusion, Corrigan met an accident while

helping one of those hookers, Jazzlyn. The similarity between him and the tightrope

walker is that as the tightrope walker was maintaining balance on the rope to reach

the other side likewise Corrigan tries to gain balance throughout his life between his

personal codes of morality and the rules of being in Order. The thing is that nothing is

fixed and stable in this world, everything is in a process of evolution and

transformation. There can be no final word about anything.

The next voice after Corrigan is Claire Soderberg "tall, still thin, jet-black

hair, a single streak of badger gray from the temple. Fifty-two years old" (74). With

her voice the narrative shifts from masculine to feminine perspective. This

male/female dichotomy in narration stresses upon the authority which is being given

to the different narrators irrespective of their gender because all the narrators add

something new in the narrative. Though she is not related directly with the main

events of the narrative yet her voice unfolds some of the important threads that help

enhancing the plot. Through her voice we are able to get another point of view about

the tightrope walker as he is trying to establish his identity through his rebellious

aerial stunt likewise she is struggling to reinstate her social identity after the death of

her only son; in the company of other ladies who belong to different stratas of society.

She tries to maintain her uniqueness among them.

Her narration starts with a commentating voice that informs us about Claire's

life, her social status and her daily routines. Her personal narrative is comprised of

her memories about her son. She is a grief-stricken mother who has lost her son in the

war. Though she is living a luxurious life but her abundance of money cannot bring

her dead son back to life. All the comforts are meaningless to her and she is living an

artificial life which has lost its vitality. She tries to lessen her grief and sorrow by

spending some time with her friends but in the end she always finds herself in

despair. She has some friends who have either lost their sons in the war or share her

grief that life has become colourless for them. "She has been to four houses over the

past eight months." (76) Gloria is one of those friends who live in Bronx among those

projects in which Corrigan was living. She has lost three sons in the war. We are

introduced to the other friends, Jacqueline, Marcia and Janet as well. Every time they

gather together, they used to make long preparations before going to each other's

place. "We find, as in old jewellery, the gone days of our lives" (76) says Mrs.

Soderberg. She is a grieved mother who wants to forget the miseries of life by sharing

her sorrows with other people who have undergone the same experience. Her life is

like a tightrope walk upon which she is walking where she has left her past behind

and is grappling with present which is leading her towards an unknown destination,

and it is also uncertain that she will pass through these difficulties. Her snobbish life

is an attempt to show that she is leading a contented life but in reality she joins these

gatherings to blow out her sorrows in the smoke of tobacco. War has done a great

harm to her; she has hated its existence from the core of her heart "War. The

disgusting proximity of it. Its body odour. Its breath on her neck all the time, two

years now pullout, three, two a half, five million, does it matter? Nothing's over. The

cream becomes the milk. The first star at morning is the last one at night. " (85)

When Marcia informs them about the tightrope walker, all of them have their

individual opinions about him. Their dialogues are truthful justification of their

existence in the world, in which they have suffered a lot and which has challenged

their identities. They are struggling to re-establish their identities to give their

existence some sort of meaning. They are afraid of the idea that a young man is up in

the air and what could happen to him. This reminds them of their lost sons and the

very idea of his fall from the height frightens them. Each of them expresses her

reaction after hearing the news of their son's death. Claire says "It was a sergeant and

then he just said, your son is passed, ma'am well, I just flat out wept, says Janet says

Jacqueline, I felt like there was rushing steam going up inside me, right up my spine.

I could feel it hissing in my brain." (110) By the end of her story, Claire succeeds in

figuring out that what is the connection between her and the tightrope walker.

She knows what it is about the walking man. It strikes her deep and hard and

shivery. It has nothing to do with angels or devils. Nothing to do with art, or

the reformed, or the intersection of a man with a vector, man beyond nature.

None of that. He was up there out of a sort of loneliness. What his mind was,

what his body was: a sort of loneliness. With no thought at all for death."

(112)

She realizes the fact that life with all its sufferings is worth living and that

death is the ultimate end of everyone so one should enjoy this life because if it gives

you sorrows it has a lot of good things to offer too. This belief makes her forget the

hardships of her life. She says "Let's pull back the curtains and allow light through

we hurt, and have one another for the healing" (114). Lara and Blaine are the

characters who are introduced in the chapter A Fear of Love. Lara is twenty-eight and

Blaine thirty-two, both are married two years ago. They were going in their Pontiac

Landau when they had a crash with a van. It was the same van in which Corrigan and

Jazzlyn were going. After the collision both, Lara and Blaine escaped from the scene.

They are artists and living in New York to earn their livelihood. Most of the money

was spent heedlessly as Lara says:-

. . . Most of the money was going towards our habits. Coke, speed, valium,

black beauties, sensimilla, `ludes, Tuinals, Benzedrine: whatever we could

find. Blaine and I spent whole weeks in the city hardly sleeping. We moved

among the loud-mouthed sinners of the Village. Hardcore parties, where we

walked through the pulsing music and lost each other for an hour, two hours,

three hours, on end Sex parties, Swap parties, Speed parties. We inhaled

poppers and gorged on champagne. This is happiness, we screamed at each

other across the floor. (123)

Lara is a blond girl; her mother was a Norwegian model. She is fully aware of

her beauty "I'd had enough beauty to get taxi drivers fighting" (124). But after the

extravagant life of sex and drinking, she realises that she is losing her charm. "There

comes a point when, tired of losing, you decide to stop failing yourself" (126). She

had a different idea about spending her life; she liked twenties and has adopted all

styles of dressing from that time. But when they discarded the life of pomp and show

they took refuge in painting nature; they painted pond, kingfisher, silence and moon

above the trees. There was calmness in their life when suddenly their life took a turn

in the shape of an accident. It was when, their whole year's hard work, their paintings

got washed away in the rain, that Lara started making connections between her

wasted labour and the wasted lives of the two people who were seriously injured or

perhaps dead in that collision.

We can make parallel between Claire and Lara who have lost their most

precious possessions and the way they are transformed by this. Where Claire from the

upper strata of society tries to reshape her isolated life in the company of her friends;

Lara being an artist is deeply touched by this loss and the accident transforms her life

altogether. Claire is simply trying to save her social identity but Lara tries to sort out

things to decrease her sense of guilt after the accident. She was unable to control

herself; it was a condition in which "you want 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, run it backward unshatter the glass, go about your day untouched" (128).

Feelings of remorse and guilt dominated her and her husband though he was touched

by it in a slightly different way. She reads about the tightrope walker in newspaper

and imagines his defiant act against the laws. Blaine has altogether different opinion

about life and art; the wastage of his paintings does not changed his view rather he

was thinking in another way that if they had done something in the past and the

present has ruined it, they need not to bother about that for they can twist it in favour

of them and get advantage of this. His ideology seems to be dissimilar because he

thinks and reacts somewhat differently from that of Lara.

Lara's sense of guilt takes her to `Metropolitan Hospital' where Corrigan and

Jazzlyn were brought after the accident. The narrative voice describes Lara's

condition and her feelings of remorse when she receives late Corrigan's possessions.

"I had taken it out of embarrassment, out of a sense of duty to my lie, an obligation to

save face, and perhaps even to save my hide" (136). Though Corrigan is an unknown

person for her and she also knows nothing about Jazzlyn, but she feels herself forced

to pick up the possessions of Corrigan from the hospital. Perhaps she is doing this to

compensate for the wrong which is committed by Blaine and Lara herself. Her guilt

leads her to the Bronx with which she had no connection before. This is how the

accident on the FDR links her life with that of the inhabitants of the Bronx. Lara

returns the possessions of Corrigan to Ciaran and afterwards accompanies him to the

funeral of Jazzlyn. She feels a kind of affinity with Ciaran `we were the only white

people there' (144). Soon after her arrival in the Bronx, she comes to know that

Jazzlyn was a prostitute which reduces her guilt for some time but then her

conscience scolds her of cheap thinking and she realizes that her life is totally

different from that of Jazzlyn's. Though living in New York, Jazzlyn was known

because of her identity as a black, her social status as being a prostitute and her

belonging to the lower outcast strata of the society. She was forced to do such things

because society offered very few opportunities to the outcasts. As the priest says in

the cemetery:

Young girls like Jazzlyn were forced to do horrific things this was a vile

world. It forced her into the vile things. She had not asked for it she was under

the yoke of tyranny. Slavery may be over and gone, but it was still apparent

and now she is on her way to a place where there were no governments to

chain her or enslave her (145).

The preacher's words `behind you will be a life that you never want to see

again' (145) reminds Lara of her previous life which was full of wrong-doings and to

which she does not want to move again. She now realizes that all the difficulties in

life lead you to some sort of `beauty' in the end which purifies you and alters you in a

new person. The narrative voice shifts from Lara to Tillie, mother of Jazzlyn. She

tells about Jazzlyn's liking for a castle she saw in a magazine; `she went, clipped it

out, and taped it on the wall above her bed' (147). When Corrigan came to the Bronx,

she told him about that castle and he promised her to bring that castle for her. He used

to bring coffee for her daily and strengthened her belief of getting a castle; `they were

gonna have mead that's like wine and lots of good food and there were gonna be

harps playing and lots of dancing' (147).

The narrative voice again shifts from Tillie to Ciaran. While going back from

cemetery; Ciaran accompanies Lara and after seeing her damaged Pontiac he

recognizes that it was the car responsible for the death of his brother. Lara tries to

explain things to him; `i was clawing around frantically, looking for any justification,

and yet there was still another part of me that thought perhaps I was being honest, or

as honest as I could get, having left the scene of the crime, having run away from the

truth. Blaine had said that things just happen. It was a pathetic logic, but it was, at its

core, true. Things happen. We had not wanted them to happen. They had arisen out of

the ashes of chance.' (151)

While telling Ciaran about the accident details, Lara feels light in herself but

she hides the truth that Blaine was driving the Pontiac. She wanted Ciaran to curse

and damn her for lying because she feels herself responsible for the loss which her act

of negligence has brought into the life of Ciaran and all the other people who are

connected with Corrigan and Jazzlyn. At home when Blaine tries to get her to the bed

she refused him plainly and felt the need to walk out of Blaine's life. Ciaran talks

about many things of Corrigan and his childhood to Lara. He tells her that the thing

he likes most about his brother `is that he made people become what they didn't think

they could become. He twisted something in their hearts. Gave them new places to go

to. Even dead, he'd still do that.' (154) As he has changed Lara's point of view and

way of living after his death.

With the next chapter the narrative voice also shifts from Ciaran to the

tightrope walker again; thus making connections with all the voices of the narrative.

This abrupt shift of voice helps the reader to dissociate them from the main action. It

prevents the readers to get engaged and identify with the characters and thus allows

more elasticity of meaning to the narrative. It also suggests that more positive

changings are possible in the lives of these characters because they are carrying and

shifting their lives from one point to the other and are not obstacle or hindered by the

losses which came into their way.

Thus the voice of tightrope walker helps to advance the plot and adds a new

string in the course of narrative. His walk is an act of defiance because he tries to

supersede laws and put his life in danger which is prohibited by laws and by his act

he wants to ascertain his individuality by breaking social orders and defying human

limitations. We are told about the history of tightrope walker's life; his hopping from

one foot to another to practice balance `the cable was guy-lined by a number of well-

tightened cavallettis. Sometimes he loosened them so the cable would sway. It

improved his balance.' (157) The voice tells us about the preparations that tightrope

walker has been making for six years to get adept in the art of tightrope walking; `the

full turn, the tiptoe, the pretend fall, the cartwheel, bouncing a soccer ball on his head,

the bound walk, with his ankles tied together' (158). He wants to walk over the rope

`beautifully' (160); to him, it was like a faith to walk upon the wire facing all the

dangers and difficulties with a hope to get on the other side of the wire. It can be a

kind of metaphor for the life which is being lived by all the people, introduced to us

through the narrative voices. The life which is uncertain, full of disturbing and

troublesome events for many of the characters; `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' (161). As the priest has talked about the purification and lightness of soul

after passing through the difficulties so is the case with tightrope walker, he feels

himself floating as if he has got wings, a process of purification.

Within seconds he was pureness moving, and he could do anything he liked.

He was inside and outside his body at the same time, indulging in what it

meant to belong to air, no future, no past, and this gave him the offhand vaunt

to his walk. He was carrying his life from one side to the other the core reason

for it all was beauty. Walking was a divine delight. Everything was rewritten

when he was up in the air. New things were possible with the human form. It

went beyond equilibrium. (164)

The idea behind this is the fact that after the sufferings one gets purification of

soul, worldly upheavals remain unimportant and what gains prominence is the vision

of `beauty' beyond that. When the soul is purified the person becomes `uncreated'

(164) free from shackles of the world.

The next narrative voice is that of Fernando Marcano, an imagist in the Bronx,

USA. He is a person who is always running after the tags because `it's the only thing

that oils the hinges of his day he loves the way the letters curl, the arcs, the swerves,

the flames, their clouds' (167- 68). He is fond of the tags which are inside the tunnels

he is not concerned with the tags found `aboveground' (168). He likes their presence

in the darkness when they get illuminated by the traffic lights. They are ordinary

things but they mean a lot to him when they shine in the light; `the surprise of them'

(168). The ordinariness of the tags makes connection with the ordinary lives of the

people living in New York and the dark underground ways are suggestive of the

complexities and intricacies of life. `It was there, it was his, he owned it. It would not

be scrubbed off. They couldn't put an underground wall in an acid bath. You can't

buff that. A maximum tag. It was like discovering ice.' (169) He lives in the Bronx it

makes connection with the other narratives of this novel. His narrative voice

expresses his consciousness `the way the light came through. Making people see

differently. Making them think twice. You have to look on the world with a shine like

no one else has' (173).

Next chapter Etherwest introduces a new voice of Sam Peters, a computer

programmer. He tries to get information about the tightrope walker by computer

phreaking. He gets information from New York while himself sitting in California;

the narrative voice tells us about the technological advancement in America during

1970s through the character of Sam. The progress in technology has brought people

together even from far off areas and their lives get connected with each other. `This is

America. You can hit the frontier. You can go anywhere. It's about being connected,

access, gateways, like a whispering game where if you get one thing wrong you've

got to go all the way back to the beginning' (197). Though the voices of Fernando

and Sam refer to the minor characters in the narrative yet they are of equal

importance as that of major ones. They are not given a continuing role and appear

momentarily in the action still their individuality sets the mood and gives the

narrative a more complete shape. They have nothing deeper in their characteristics

but still they are not minor because they tend to confirm something about the main

characters. They act as an excellent tool to explore and analyse the main characters.

They are there to heighten tension of the plot and also help moving the action ahead.

As phone hacking provides the hackers a chance to connect with various people

whom they do not know; they may symbolize the multitude of people who were

brought together by a single act of tightrope walking. There were people who were

not even acquainted with one another yet this single event tied their lives together

either directly or indirectly. Similarly, the imagist who is fond of taking photographs

in the darkened tunnels may symbolize Corrigan who is also interested in the dark

and shadowy lives of the social outcasts. And his liking for the ordinary tags may be

taken as his concern for the ordinary people who are doomed into darkness. The

tunnels may also symbolize the lives of Tillie and Jazzlyn whose unlit lives were

captured by Corrigan and his endeavours to bring them to light by extending his

helping hand towards them. We can say by analysing their narrations that these minor

characters serve as plot advancement and character revelation respectively.

Tillie Henderson is the next important narrative voice that comes next to Sam.

A prostitute by profession, mother of Jazzlyn, lives in projects in the Bronx. Her

character is introduced through first person narrative. Her voice explains the social

status of prostitutes as being on the periphery of the society which offers them

nothing or very little. Their position as social outcasts allows them no advantages at

all. The homodigetic voice tells about her mother's association with a church in the

last days of her life which was spent in strolling. Tillie adopted the profession at the

age of nine. `Hooking was born in me I put on my first lipstick when I was nine'

(199). The chapter begins with her being in jail under the allegations of `Loitering.

Prostitution offense. Class A misdemeanour. Criminal possession controlled

substance 7

degree. Criminal trespass 2

degree. Criminal possession narcotic

drug, class E felony. Prostitution solicitation, class A, misdemeanour Degree o'

(198). We are told that when Jazzlyn was born, Tillie said `I'm gonna treat her good

all her life' (200). The voice goes on to describe that the hookers do not want their

girls to work like them same is the case with Tillie. After the birth of Jazzlyn, she

decides to keep her at home so that she can escape from the miserable life that she

herself is living. `So you work the stroll to keep her off the stroll' (200). She came to

New York having a dream of getting a big house and plenty of money for Jazzlyn.

She worked for TuKwik, her `daddy' (203) in New York. Then she moved towards

Ohio for two weeks, `The smart daddy looks for the girl who walks alone. I walked

alone for two weeks' (204). Here her daddy was called Jigsaw. `He kept a

handkerchief in his pocket. His secret was that inside the handkerchief he had taped a

row of razor blades. He could take it out and make a puzzle of your face' (205). With

Jigsaw, Tillie made more money but he was shot by someone after that. Tillie not

only tricked common people but also the renowned ones. They came in disguise to

her. `The soldiers were my best clients. When they came back they just wanted to pop

(208). They came back from Vietnam War and Tillie was all ready to serve them.

`But they needed loving. I was like a social service, word. Doing my thing for

America' (209). Tillie's voice tells us about the racial discrimination and prejudices

against the blacks by the white cops in New York. They used to strike her hard even

when she was not on the stroll. Her voice also informs about her most comfortable

experience with a man in Sherry- Netherlands. The only thing he required from her

was to read the poetry of Rumi. `It was a blow date, but all he had me do was read to

him. Persian poems I laid out on the bed buck naked and just read to the chandelier.

He didn't even want to touch me. He sat in the chair and watched me reading. I left

with eight hundred dollars and a copy of Rumi' (209). This was the nicest experience

she's ever had in her whole life. This was the only thing that she wants to recur in her

life again. In the lock up, prisoners are allowed to visit library once in a week. And

every time Tillie gets a chance to be there she looks for Rumi. She is told in the

prison that in accident, Corrigan's chest bones were all shattered and she hopes that

perhaps Adelita will be able to gather them together once again in the heaven. After

hearing the news of the death of Jazzlyn, she is totally broken. She begins to think

that it is the fruit of her deeds which took the life of her daughter. `. . . I just stood

there beating my head against the cage like a bird.' (212)

The narrative of Tillie is full of flashbacks; her memory serves as a tool to

remember her past experiences in order to complete her tasks the whole of her life

comes before her eyes when she hears the news of her daughter's demise. She re-

constructs the memories to fit her current needs and motives. This formation and

organisation of memories help structuring the identity and they influence on an

individual's development. Memories also help the narrator to represent her self

accurately. Tillie was brought in the Bronx by a daddy L.A. Rex; who was a nigger

himself but he did not like Negroes. He took her in the Bronx for it was the place for

those hookers who were no more in demand; `He said I got old. He said I was

useless' (216). There she gets a work of `putting stickers on supermarket cans' (217)

to meet the expenses of the school where Jazzlyn has got admission.

This flashback is disrupted with a call in the prison that she has a visitor to

meet. This intentional disruption is to provide more information about the voice and it

also serves as a u-turn from the past to the present. She thinks that her grandbabies

are there in the visiting room. But when she gets there she notices a white woman

with `blond hair and green eyes and pearly-white skin' (220). She introduces herself

as the one who knows the key ring, Ciaran. Tillie makes out that she was the lady

who came with Ciaran on the funeral of Jazzlyn. ` She tells me that she is an artist

and she is dating Corrigan's brother, even though she's married they fell in love,

she's getting her life together, she used to be an addict' (221). She promises to put

some money in Tillie's prison account so that she may be able to get some cigarettes

for herself. Tillie also asks her to bring Jazzlyn back to her and with this very demand

that lady `goes white at the gills' (222). She assures Tillie of bringing her grandbabies

to her and departs with tears in her eyes. After that the voice of Tillie takes us back in

her past life but this time she reflects over Corrigan and her relationship. `They say

boys always want to be the first with girls, and girls always want to be the last with

boys. But with Corrie all of us wanted to be the first.' (224)

When he celebrated his thirty-first birthday, Tillie bought him a cake he cut

the cake in slices, distributed it among us and took the last one for himself. She has

got a real liking for him `Corrigan was a stone-cold stud. I woulda married him I

woulda kissed his ear if he gave me a chance. I woulda spilled my love right down

into him I could've eaten everything Corrie said, I coulda just gobbled it all down'

(225-26). Not only Tillie but Jazzlyn also used to love him immensely, she loved him

like `chocolate' (226). The voice of Tillie tells about another incident when she left a

letter in the bathroom of Corrigan in which she has called him by his real name `John

Andrew' (228). She was told by Corrigan that he did not like his name because it

reminds him of his father who left them alone.

Tillie is so much grieved on her pathetic life that she is all determined to ask

God about it if she ever get the chance to meet Him. `I'll get Him to tell me why He

done what He done to me and what He done to Corrie and why do all the good ones

die and where is Jazzlyn now and why she ended up there and how He allowed me to

do what I done to her' (230). It is not the world which is despicable and evil but the

people in it as Tillie says, `If you think of the world without people it's about the

most perfect thing there ever is. It's all balanced and shit. But then come the people,

and they fuck it up' (230).

Tillie had a great desire to meet her grandbabies and despite her repeated

pleading no one helped to bring the babies to her. The babies also have a pivotal role

to play in the narrative because they symbolize the element of hope and positivity for

they have been raised by a respectable family. It also suggests the end of the horrid

and disgusting chain of prostitution and exploitation through which Tillie and Jazzlyn

had to pass. Her prison matron informed her that she was being sent to upstate prison

for some months and she requested her to make her meet her babies but the matron

said `Get the hell out of here'. She was so much infuriated that she attacked the

matron and her imprisonment was extended for eighteen months more, this time she

was being sent to Connecticut. And perhaps it is out of Lara's efforts that she was

able to meet her babies there. They were with some black lady from the projects.

Tillie was familiar with the woman and has seen her in the elevator many times. At

the time of departure, little Janice touched the finger of Tillie `It was like magic'

(234). In the end of Tillie's narrative, she thinks that she is not sure that the world

will pardon her of the guilt of thrusting Jazzlyn in the stroll but she is sure of one

thing that her grandbabies are never going to do this thing ever.

The next voice is about tightrope walker again. His voice puts him in the

centre of the towers and of the narration too. In the start of the narrative, the tightrope

walker exemplifies the purpose and focus which is missing from the character's lives

but in the end he reflects that very purpose and focus which propels these characters

to move on. As far as the space is concerned, the narrative moves from the centre to

periphery and vice versa. The only purpose of his performing this tightrope walking is

to forget everything about existence. He wants to become unidentified to himself.

`The wire was about pain too but the joy was losing the pain so that it no longer

mattered' (241). He wanted to feel the condition of losing himself on the wire. After

he was seized by the sergeants, he was asked by the crowd and reporters of the reason

but he felt himself inclined to ask that why they were asking him the reason. It was a

journey to forget the pains and agonies of life and to stop thinking about one's

existence in the world.

The next voice is that of Mr. Soderberg, a judge in New York; his voice tells

us about the happenings in the New York City. "New York had a way of doing that.

Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a

day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you

had to shake your head in disbelief." (247) Mr. Soderberg is of the view that in this

city things repeat to happen because it does not feel any liability to the past. It is

moving forward continuously because it never cares about what happened in the past.

It is sad because the city will also not remember Corrigan as a modern day

reincarnation of Christ. This is the reason that there are not so many memorials in this

city. People are used to live in "everyday present" (247) they are not concerned with

what occurred yesterday. Mr. Soderberg thinks that what would be the reason which

triggered the tightrope walker to perform this kind of strange thing between the Twin

Towers. To him, the tightrope walker has generated a kind of monument for himself.

Soderberg was sitting in his chamber when his fellow judge Pollack updated him

about a young man striding between the Twin Towers. "The man Pollack was talking

about had actually walked between the towers. Not only that, but he had lain down on

the wire. He had hopped. He had danced. He had virtually run across from one side to

the other." (251) Pollack also informs him that the guy has been taken into custody

under the accusations of `criminal trespass, `reckless endangerment and self-

aggrandization' (251). Soderberg was probably going to deal with the tightrope

walker in the court. He thinks that it will add a spice to his daily routine. The

narrative voice tells about the judicial profession; "most people thought that he lived

in some sort of mahogany heaven, that it was a highfalutin job, a powerful career, but

the true fact of the matter was that, beyond reputation, it didn't amount to much at

all" (252). He thinks of himself as a person who is wearing a dark wrap, on a ladder

drawing out all the decayed leaves from the gutters with his bare hands. He came into

this profession with the thoughts of turning around the system but he has now realized

that "The greatest part of the law was the wisdom of toleration. One had to accept the

fools" (255). He acknowledges his position as a man who is there to protect people

and their rights, who is there to maintain peace and justice in the city but despite all

his endeavours the happenings in the New York City was very much disgusting. The

city itself becomes a character when Soderberg's voice informs that:-

How it lifted babies by the hair, and how it raped seventy-year old women,

and how it sets fire to couches where lovers slept and how the union men ran

roughshod over their bosses, and how the Mafia took a hold of the boardwalks

and how fathers used daughters as ashtrays and how whole families got blown

away, and how paramedics ended up with crushed skulls, and how addicts

shot heroin into their tongues and how shop-keepers gave back the wrong

change, and how the mayor wheezed and wheedled and lied while the city

burned down to the ground, got itself ready for its own little funeral of ashes,

crime, crime, crime." (257)

From the time Soderberg has appointed as a judge every case that came into

his way was about every possible evil that was there in the city. To him it was like

"surveying the evolution of slime" (257). These vices get on increasing despite his

hard battle against them. When the session gets started in the court the tightrope

walker was brought in front of him. "He was blond, in his mid-twenties and yet there

was a confidence that rolled off him, a swagger that Soderberg liked." (265)

He called his bridge and decided for the case of Tillie Henderson first. It is a

case of robbery against Tillie and Jazzlyn in which Jazzlyn's case was spared because

there was no sufficient witness to identify her. Tillie gave up her right to the trial and

was sentenced eight months in the lock up. She tried to say something to Jazzlyn and

Corrie who were sitting in the spectators section but was obstructed by the court

officers. Soderberg watches Tillie, "Her face looked odd and vulnerable there was a

shine to her, a glisten" (274). She was departing the court as if she was going to a

long journey. Then the voice of Soderberg arises and he calls out for the tightrope

walker to come up.

The next voice in the narrative is that of Adelita. Her story is told in first-

person narration. It focalizes mostly on the relationship between her and Corrigan.

The voice of Adelita describes that it is the first time when Corrigan slept with her in

her clapboard house. Her voice tells about the time when she first saw Corrigan; he

was there in front of the nursing home, he was helping some of the hookers out there.

There were some cuts and contusions on his face but still there was something which

point towards his loyalty. Later on she comes to know that he received these wounds

from the pimps, "he took their worst punches and never hit back" (277). His van was

covered with the stickers of peace and justice. He was loyal to his God and towards

these girls but he was unaware of the fact that this fidelity was going to be shattered.

Corrigan was quite at ease with her children Eliana and Jacobo. There came some

times when she wanted her children to disappear for some time so that she may spend

some time with Corrigan alone, without any disturbance. "But just let me be alone,

with him, this man, Corrigan, for a tiny while, just me and him, together" (282).

With him, Adelita learns about his habits, like he used to cool his cafe with

three short and one long blow. That he cannot feel the taste of cereal and that "he's

good at fixing toasters." (283) All she wanted was that he may accept both his Order

and her. She is never able to understand that what he means by the word beauty he

whispered to her in his last moments. "I can only hope that in the last minute he was

at peace." (283) Her voice also notifies that she has heard of the man who walked

between the Twin Towers.

Corrigan was in his van that night in front of courthouse and perhaps he

looked at that man in the air early in the morning. Maybe it is the sight of that man

who was challenging God that aggravated him or maybe it was because of the case in

which that man got bail while Tillie got more penalty. Adelita is not sure of the

reason of his anger. "Things are tangled, there are no answers, maybe he thought she

deserved another chance, he was angry, she shouldn't have gone to jail. Or maybe

something else got to him" (284). She says that Corrigan used to say that there is no

better faith than a wounded faith. And sometimes she thinks that perhaps Corrigan

was trying to wound his faith by living with her. Perhaps he wanted to test his faith.

At times when she is completely broken she thinks that perhaps he was driving so

rashly because he wanted to tell her that he is finished with her. And in her ecstatic

moments she thinks that perhaps he was coming to inform her that he is ready to

leave his Order just to live with her. In the very end of her narrative, she says that

even in his absence, Corrigan was there in her clapboard house. He is there with his

arms spread around Eliana and Jacobo. Her voice echoes:-

Nothing will ever really take him from the couch. It is just a simple brown

thing, with mismatching cushions, and a hole in the armrest where it has been

worn through, a few coins from his pocket fallen down into the gaps, 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. (284)

The next voice in the narrative is that of Gloria, friend of Claire Soderberg.

Her story is also told in first person narration. The voice tells her history right from

her childhood in southern Missouri to her old age in the Bronx. She was the only girl

in the house and had five brothers. Her father was a house painter and during the

Great Depression he tried to keep his job in a hope of getting something for his

family. This shortage of money did not upset her mother. She was the lady who had

seen many worst as well as best times in her life. She had with her an exchange slip

which was given to her as a reminder after her mother was sold. She kept this slip

with her to remind herself "of where she came from" (286). After many years she

sold it to a museum curator of New York and bought a second-hand sewing machine

for herself. Gloria's mother used to work as a cleaner in the newspaper office. She

often told the stories of colored people fighting for their rights to her children. For

Gloria, her mother's face was the most beautiful one in the world. "dark as darkness,

full, perfectly oval, with eyes that looked like my father had painted them, and a

mouth that had a slight downturn of sadness, and the brightest teeth, so that when she

smiled, it threw her whole face into another relief" (287). Gloria lost her two brothers

in the Second World War, she was sent to a college in Syracuse, New York. After

that she never returned home. She got married here in New York and got busy with

her three sons. The voice of Gloria says that after thirty years of her marriage she has

totally changed. "I've got dresses that pull tight in the rear and keep my bosom from

swaying I carry a white handbag with a looping handle. I wear hose stockings right up

to my knees and sometimes I pull on a set of white gloves that go high to my

elbows." (289)

Gloria lost her two husbands and her three sons in different ways. And the

state of being alone has broken her. She now tries to find peace of mind in the

company of the grieved mothers who have also lost their sons in the war. Gloria's

narration is also replete with flashbacks. Again her voice takes a back shift and

informs about the time when she left Missouri she was only seventeen. She got

admission in Syracuse on a scholarship. She along with other colored fellows was

invited for talk about the emancipation of the colored people. She can clearly

remember that though all the listeners were present but none of them seem to be

present there. She completed her graduation with honors and she was the first colored

girl who did this. Her first marriage was with Thomas, who was an engineering

student and a renowned debater. Soon after their marriage they realized that they had

made a mistake. She expresses her feelings as:-

Some people think love is the end of the road, and if you're lucky enough to

find it, you stay there. Other people say it just becomes a cliff you drive off;

but most people who have been around awhile know it's just a thing that

changes day by day, and depending on how much you fight for it, you get it,

or you hold on to it, or you lose it, but sometimes it's never even there in the

first place. (304)

This was the case with Gloria and her husband and right after eleven months of their

marriage, he told her that he was looking for "another empty box to fit inside" (304).

She did not tell her parents about her divorce. She decided to go back to Missouri but

she did not. And then she heard the news that her parents had passed away. She was

told that after a week of her mother's demise her father also died. "I remember

thinking that they went like lovers. They couldn't survive without each other. It was

like they had spent their lives breathing each other's breath" (305).

After this terrible loss, Gloria decided to come to New York. She wanted to

make her life thrilling. She was twenty-two years old; she wanted to forget her past

by engrossing herself in some business. But even in New York, she wasn't able to

forget the place to which she belonged. On the racetracks, the horses remind her of

Missouri; "They smelled of home, of fields, of creek sides" (306). There she met a

tall, dark man who left her in the Bronx projects on the eleventh floor. It was her

second and last marriage and she was left there with three sons. In the streets of New

York, she observed that there were a lot of fences and wires, people had put their

radios in the windows. Women were looking out of the high windows in the streets

and down there were beggars who were gathered there at the traffic signals in wait of

getting something from the cars that would stop there. ". . . everything in New York is

built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last,

and connected" (306).

Her voice takes a forward shift and she tells that in the newspaper called The

Village Voice she goes through the ad by Marcia about those two baby girls who

needed looking after. She composed a letter that she wants to meet her in this regard.

She was coming back to her house in the Bronx with Claire when they saw them two

baby girls; "two darling little girls coming through the globes of lamplight" (321).

Gloria was acquainted with these girls; they were the daughters of a hooker

who used to live in the same projects two floors above hers. Gloria has tried all the

time to avoid them. She did not want them to come near her life. She has even saw

their mother who herself was very young; a pretty and wild girl. She has never made

any attempt to have a talk with them. Some social workers were bringing those girls

out of the building and both of the girls were looking afraid. They were taking them

to some institution.

The kids were being bundled towards the back of the car. One of them had

started crying. She was holding on to the antenna of the car and wouldn't let

go. The social worker tugged her, but the child hung on I stepped out. It didn't

seem to me that I was in the same body anymore." (322)

Gloria tried to stop them and went near the girls. The younger of those baby girls,

Janice, reached out to Gloria and she thought "nothing felt better than that, not in a

long time" (322). There were some policemen too; they asked her if she knew the

babies and she replied in affirmation. She realized that this was the most beautiful lie

of her life.

The narrative takes a shift and jumps from 1970s to 2006. This time the

narrative voice is that of Jaslyn, one of the daughters of Jazzlyn. The narrative starts

with Jaslyn looking at the picture of tightrope walker walking between the towers;

she found this picture four years before in San Francisco in a sale. She bought it from

there and got it framed. She has developed a certain affinity with this picture because

it was taken on the same day when her mother died. It was so much precious for her

that she carried it with her everywhere she goes. "When she travels she always tucks

the photo in tissue paper along with the other mementoes: a set of pearls, a lock of her

sister's hair" (326). The voice informs that Jaslyn gets nervous in the company of

people who belong to her age group. She was known as a stiff and firm girl at work; a

girl "with ice in her veins" (328). She used to join her fellow workers off and on.

When she came at work there was always inflexibility visible from her gait. She was

a tall girl with cinnamon skin and serious lips; she wore no makeup. Her dark eyes

create a strange aura around her "she strikes people as intelligent and dangerous, an

otherland stranger" (328). She decides to go to New York to see Claire who was on

her death bed. In the plane, she gets familiarised with an Italian doctor Pino; he was

her age fellow or five to six years older than her. She tells him that she works as an

accountant in a foundation that works for the tax preparations for the left over people

after Rita and Katrina. She even tells him about her experience at theatre which was a

secret before. "It is the first time in years that she's opened herself to a stranger. It's

as if she has bitten into the skin of an apricot" (330). But one thing which she still

kept to herself was that her mother and grandmother belonged to the line of hookers.

She remembers that when she was young she used to walk along the pavement with

one foot on it and one on the road. She imagines that Claire and Gloria were like that

walking on the same pavement but one of them on it and the other on the road. Pino

and Jaslyn exchanged their visiting cards to each other as the plane takes off.

She almost wishes her co-workers were here, that they could see her, bidding

goodbye to an Italian man, a doctor, on Park Avenue, in the dark, in the cold,

in the rain, in the wind, in the night. Like there might 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 good-bye. (334)

She reaches at Mrs. Soderberg residence and introduces herself as a niece of

Mrs. Soderberg to the nurse who was appointed there to take care of Claire. There

were some five to six people already there in the apartment. Jaslyn came here so that

she would attend her in her last days. It was her responsibility because almost six

years ago Claire has spent her time with Gloria on her death bed. She still remembers

that when Gloria died; she had a smile on her face. She was buried in the plot at the

back of her old house. She also buried with Gloria a hand-painted sign of her father

and a sewing tin which belonged to her mother. The voice informs that Jaslyn was not

welcomed by the people at Claire's apartment. She was not even allowed to saw her

once. Then there is a flashback again and the voice tells about her visit to Ireland

"shortly after the attacks on Afghanistan" (341). She has heard about the Irish priest

Corrigan, who also died with her mother. She was curious to know more about him.

Her sister Janice, however, opposed the idea. She had nothing to do with the past; she

was rather ashamed of her past and wanted to forget that. But Jaslyn wanted to come

to terms with her past, she was in search of her identity to live her life peacefully. So,

Jaslyn went to Dublin alone to inquire something about that man. It was very much

easy for her to find out Corrigan's brother who was a CEO in a renowned internet

company. "Ciaran was in his early sixties with a small peninsula of hair on his

forehead." (341) He informed her with every detail of the life of his late brother,

Corrigan. She asked him whether her mother was in love with Corrigan and Ciaran

replied that he was just giving her a lift when they met that accident and that his

brother was in love with another woman who belonged to South America. He took

Jaslyn to his house; the same in which he and Corrigan grew up. There Jaslyn met his

wife, Lara, who was a "kind, slim, gentle, her gray hair pulled back into a bun. She

had the bluest eyes, they looked like small drops of September sky She drew Jaslyn

close, held her for a moment longer than expected: she smelled of paint" (342-43).

She spent a quality time there with Ciaran and Lara; he told her about the life of his

brother and it seemed to her as if he was talking about the losses of his life. The next

day she met Pino again in a coffee bar.

They find each other slowly, tentatively, shyly, drawing apart, merging again,

and it strikes her that she has never really known the body of another.

Afterward they lie together without speaking, their bodies touching lightly,

until she rises and dresses quietly." (347)

After that she decided to visit Claire and bought some flowers for her. When

she got arrived at her apartment, she asked the nurse about the other people who had

previously refused her intention of seeing Mrs. Soderberg. The nurse takes her to

Claire's bedroom; where she is lying on the bed, her breasts have shrunk, her neck is

striated and there is an obscure expression. Jaslyn goes towards the window, lifts up

the curtains so that some light may come in. She slides the window frame and feels

the breeze on her skin. She comes back to Claire's bed and lies beside her and thinks

that "we stumble on, bring a little noise into the silence, find in others the ongoing of

ourselves. It is almost enough" (349). It seems to her that a life keeps going and it is

lived in various ways. It has so many unopened covers. The world keeps revolving

and there is no end to it. Sorrow and love are truths and they keep moving and

twirling in human world and it continues in this way.

The narrative of Jaslyn marks an end to the narrative but not to the life

because life is an ongoing mystery. Things continue to occur and reoccur around

ourselves and we cannot escape it. Life hooks us up with many people whom we do

not know, never will be, but it arranges the events in such a way and ties us together.

Thus, the story of one person never comes to an end; it goes on in a different way

through another person. This is the basis of polyphonic narration which McCann has

artfully employed in this narrative. He has introduced some eleven characters who are

by no means associated with one another and yet they are. One's life spins around

another and so on. Every character in the narrative has its own consciousness and

justifies it through his voice capturing all the subjective and objective details of his

life. It helps us not to look at a single reality but the way this reality appears to every

character. This enables every character to comprehend reality about him and about

others who are inter-linked with him, and he has the ability to comment upon the

reality of himself and that of the others. As Bakhtin puts it in Problems of

Dostoevsky's Poetics:-

[T]he hero interests Dostoevsky as a particular point of view on the world and

on oneself, as the position enabling a person to interpret and evaluate his own

self and his surrounding reality. What is important to Dostoevsky is not how

his hero appears in the world but first and foremost how the world appears to

his hero, and how the hero appears to himself. (47)

Where the purpose of polyphonic narration is to present every character with

complete understanding of his world and the realities around him; and his capability

to have a dialogue with it, the concept of hetroglossia refers to the way these multiple

voices are put together. It is related to a center which holds all these diverse voices

and put them in play. As Bakhtin describes it in Discourse in the Novel:-

These distinctive links and interrelationships between utterances and

languages, this movement of the theme through different languages and

speech types, its dispersion into the rivulets and droplets of social

hetroglossia, its dialogication--this is the basic distinguishing feature of the

stylistics of the novel. (263)

Thus in the text of Let the Great World Spin, the key force that unites all the

voices together is that of the tightrope walker which has nothing to do with the lives

of the characters presented in the novel still it enjoys a supreme condition and works

as a unifying force in the narrative. Every character is, somehow, related to him and

he affects their lives to some or great extent. The novel starts with the tightrope

walker's narrative and there are two more chapters i-e Let the Great World Spin

Forever Down and The Wringing Grooves of Change attributed to the walker. The

walker remains anonymous to the readers and there is not even a single glimpse of his

identity still he connects the lives of every character in the novel.

The tightrope walker has a connection with Corrigan because at the time of

his accident, Corrigan was distracted by him that causes the untimely death of Jazzlyn

and him. Claire, a grieved mother, who lessens her sorrow by talking to her friends

and husband, is also related to the walker for it is he who steals the attention of her

friends and husband, this makes her depressive and she gets infuriated with the

tightrope walker. For Lara, he is something who has changed her life upside down.

From the accident with Corrigan's van, she finds herself in great distress and no way

to return from that. It encourages her to leave her extravagant life once and for all.

For the young guys like Jose and Samuel, he is just an impressive entity but their

adolescent minds will no longer keep him alive. Tillie encounters him in the court but

she is unaware of his glamorous action, she is there to pay for the lifelong wrong

doings; her indulgence in strolling and sex trade which lead her to the point of no

escape. To Solomon, he is just a spice in the everyday's ordinary life. For Adelita, he

is a person who distracted her lover on his way and caused his death, she also thinks

about him as being a puzzle about which Corrigan has tried to inform her in his last

moments but which remained un-understood. Gloria takes him as a story which is told

to her by her friends. And, finally, Jaslyn takes him as a connection to her mother, for

her mother died on the same day when he performed that aerial artistry.

The tightrope walker did not only connect the characters in the narrative but

also the readers. He is also attached to us in a single or other way. Because we are

also the part of same world and almost the same events and incidents recur daily

around us. They do affect us whether we acknowledge it or not. Every day we meet

different people, be it for a little time but we cannot understand that how they are

connected to our lives. Still they have influence in our lives and this is not incidental

but according to some plan which life has woven for every one of us. This is the

central idea of the text Let the Great World Spin and this is explored through the

concepts of Polyphony and Hetroglossia presented by Bakhtin. This proves that

McCann has made use of skilful and artistic language which covers all the aspects of

every character's socio-ideological lives. As Bakhtin states in Discourse in the Novel

that:-

Language is something that is historically real, a process of heteroglot

development, a process teeming with future and former languages, with prim

but moribund aristocrat-languages, with parvenu languages and with countless

pretenders to the status of language which are all more or less successful,

depending on their degree of social scope and on the ideological area in which

they are employed. (357)

Chapter 4

Bakhtinian Carnival; a Heuristic Device to Explore Contesting Voices in

Let the Great World Spin

Leonardo da Vinci said in his book, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci

"When a man awaits the new spring, the new year, with joyful impatience, he does

not suspect that he is eagerly awaiting his own death" (1162). Bakhtin defines the

concept of Carnival in Rabelais and His World as a world in which ranks and

hierarchies are reinforced. It presents a world in which people "entered a utopian

realm of community, freedom, equality and abundance", where "a special form of

free and familiar contact reigned among people who were usually divided by the

barriers of caste, property, profession and age" (199).

Carnival is not a destructive concept rather it is regenerative, it does not

degrades the reality but "hurls it into the reproductive lower stratum, the zone in

which conception and a new birth take place" (Bakhtin 206). Carnival gives the

potentiality to otherwise suppressed and repressed voices and energies. It provides a

world in which new ideas and truths are infinitely tested and contested by the people

having equal dialogic position. It eradicates the barricades among people created by

the social forces and substitutes it with impartiality and objectivity. Carnival rejects

the notion of fixity and advocates the idea of unfinalisability of meaning.

Bakhtin's concept of Carnival serves as a useful device to investigate the

contending voices in the primary text Let the Great World Spin. The character of

Corrigan can be analyzed through the categories Bakhtin has envisaged for Carnival.

The very first category is the familiar and free interaction between people. Carnival

brings unlikely people together. It provides a space in which people can freely

express themselves by strengthening and encouraging their interaction. This idea can

be utilized while analyzing Corrigan and his relationship with social outcasts in the

Bronx. Corrigan is a priest strongly adhered to the teachings of Christianity. He says,

"I'm a pacifist" (McCann 17). His brother Ciaran comments, "It was a ritual he

couldn't give up. The down-and-outs needed him, or at least wanted him he was, to

them, a mad, impossible angel" (17).

From his early age, Corrigan was used to help out the needy and destitutes. "

The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth the filth, the war, the poverty was

that life could be capable of small beauties He wanted quite simply, for the world to

be a better place, and he was in the habit of hoping for it" (20). Despite his social

position as a respectable preacher, Corrigan spends most of his time in the company

of the people considered as social outcasts. He does not try to impose his beliefs on

others rather he joins them in order to get something beautiful out of their dark and

ruffled lives. He feels at ease in the company of drunkards and sex-workers

considering it a part of his religious duty. He suspends to adhere to his social position

and freely engages himself in the company of these socially recluse people. Together,

they create a space in which they express themselves through their interaction.

Few of the people who come across him ever knew of his religious ties and,

even in those places where he spent the longest, he was seldom known for his

beliefs instead, people looked at him with a fondness for another era, when

time seemed slower, less complicated. Even the worst of what men did to one

another didn't dampen Corrigan's beliefs. He might have been naïve, but he

didn't care; he said he'd rather die with his heart on his sleeve than end up

another cynic. (21)

The drunkards and prostitutes belonged to the lower strata of the society but

they interact with Corrigan and are comfortable in his company. Their unity breaks up

the order and regulations of the society for some time and provides them with an

opportunity to intermingle irrespective of their social stature; forming an alternate

equal space within the established standards of society. Jazzlyn, one of those hookers

expresses her likeness for Corrigan, "Your brother's cute. We love him like

chocolate. We love him like nicotine." (29) Corrigan tells his brother "they're good

people. They just don't know what it is they are doing. Or what's being done to them"

(29). And "The world tries them, then shows them a little joy" (43). There are many

dichotomies also apparent in Corrigan's personality which comes to the surface when

he is in the world where he tries to feel himself equal with other people. The

dichotomy of guilt/joy is evident whenever he is in the company of Adelita which is a

clear indication of his ambivalent personality. His religious Order tucks him to the

activities that are appropriable to a priest but there is another self in himself whose

demands want him to leave, or at least, overlook the religious ties. He says to Ciaran,

"You ever have the feeling there's a stray something or other inside you? You don't

know what it is, like a ball, or a stone, could be iron or cotton or grass or anything.

Just a big ball. And there's no way to get at it?" He cut himself short, looked away,

tapped the left side of his chest. "Well, here it is. Right here." (47) The thing is that

despite his religious duties and obligations, and his whole-hearted devotedness, there

are still some feelings inside him that push him to live some moments for himself and

these urges are inescapable. He says, "You know, when you're young, God sweeps

you up. He holds you there. The real snag is to stay there and to know how to fall. All

those days when you can't hold on any longer. When you tumble. The test is being

able to climb up again. That's what I'm looking for. But I wasn't getting up. I wasn't

able" (50). Whenever he is with Adelita, his religious Order reminds him not to fall

into the temptation but the self inside him tries to ignore this rational logic and wants

to live in her company. He expresses his dilemma in these words:-

And there was a voice inside me saying, `Strengthen yourself against this, this

is a test, be ready, be ready.' But it's the same voice I don't like. I'm looking

behind the veil of it and all I see is this woman, it's a catastrophe, I'm

descending, sinking like a hopeless swimmer. And I'm saying, God don't

allow this to happen. Don't let it. She was tapping the inside of my arm with

her fingernail, just flicking it. I closed my eyes. Please don't allow this.

Please. But it was so pleasant. I wanted to keep my eyes closed and pry them

open at the same time. No words for it, brother. (51)

The fact is that Adelita's company provides him a comfort and makes him

realize that apart from his religious tasks he needs someone to take care of him

personally. He tries his best not to fall for her but "There she was, taking me in I was

trying, really trying, to pray, get rid of my lust, return to the good, rediscover that

innocence. Circles of circles. And when you go around in circles, brother, the world is

very big, but if you plow straight ahead it's small enough. I wanted to fall along the

spokes to the centre of the circle, where there was no movement. I can't explain it,

man". (53)

Being near Adelita leaves Corrigan contented and disturbed at the same time.

He is unable to choose between the two. Where his Order prevents him from having

any personal relation, Adelita understands his problem, his limitations as being in

Order.

He says, "She knows I'm in the Order, she knows the celibacy rules,

everything. I told her. She says that if it doesn't matter to me then it doesn't matter to

her. She's the loveliest person I've ever known." (54) What Corrigan wants is to live

an ordinary life like other people but the tussle between his duties and emotions are

creating hurdles for him. He says, "I used to think there was no other man in me, no

other person, just me, the devoted one I stand in the mess of myself. It's against

everything I've ever been." (55) His dual feelings of guilt and joy are also felt by

Adelita. She says, "He kisses my lips, but then turns away from me. The unbearable

weight of complications he carries, his guilt, his joy He looks as if he wants to crouch

and protect himself" (277). Adelita also wants to break her monotonous life for a

while, to spend a few moments in the company of Corrigan. "There are times

though not often when I wish that I didn't have children at all but just let me be

alone, with him, this man, Corrigan, for a tiny while, just me and him, together"

(282). Both Corrigan and Adelita are from different paths but they are united by their

life. Though she is a believer yet she lives an ordinary life. She is not shackled in the

religious chains which obstruct her to live her life fully. Corrigan says, "Lutheran,

man Just my luck, man! I find the only non-Catholic woman in Central America.

Brilliant. She's a believer, though. She's got a heart, huge and kind. She really does."

(55) In the utopian realm, where they find a chance to express themselves freely, their

natural behaviour comes out; that inner side that has been suppressed by their social

status. Another category designed by Bakhtin for Carnivalesque is the `carnival

misalliances' which allows free interaction between the people who, in normal

condition, are incapable of coming into contact with each other. This condition is

evoked when Corrigan shares most of his time with the hookers who are by no means

equal to him in any respect. Tillie says:-

"We filled his trash can seven, eight, nine times a day. That was nasty I can't

believe Corrie used to see that stuff and he never once gave us shit about it, just

dumped it out and went on his own way. A priest! A monk! The tinkling shop." (225)

And "He was in a world of his own" (223). "We found out later he was a priest. Not

really a priest, but one of those guys who lived somewhere because he thought that he

should, like he had a duty thing, morals, some sort of shit like that, a monk, with

vows and shit, and that chastity stuff" (224).

As Bakhtin states in Rabelais and His World about this condition, "This state

offers `a completely different, non-official, extra-ecclesiastical and extra-political

aspect of the world, of man, and of human relations' (6). The practice of such

relatively alternative alliances constructs new social relations suggesting that the

dominant order is not needed. The prevalent social order of any society offers `a

centralizing tendency', signifying social and ideological cohesion' (Bakhtin 67). But

Carnival provides a chance to every person to come up with his own ideological

stance, creating an alternate space within society where different points of views are

expressed equally. Bakhtin calls it `decentralizing tendencies (that is, one that

stratifies languages) (67) so that the dominant order may call into question by these

amalgamation of voices. The centralizing order of any society is controlled by

`centripetal forces' which advocate the unity of all the voices and ideas thus

decreasing the chances of emergence of relatively new spaces within the dominant

order whereas, decentralizing order of a society is dominated by `centrifugal forces'

that perpetuate full range and diversity of different voices, new perspectives and new

order of things.

The same is the case with Mrs. Soderberg, who also breaks up the order of her

social life and steps into an escapist realm by engaging herself with her friends

belonging to different stratas of the society. This reclusion into a separate world

provides her a chance to give vent to her suppressed and repressed feelings and

emotions. It enables her to forget the furrows of her life. She gives voice to her

internal dilemmas and perplexities in the company of her friends. In her real life she

has to follow the rules and limitations but in the company of her friends, everyone

expresses herself equally and there are no more inhibitions to restrain them. She says

to herself, "The over-examined life, Claire, it's not worth living" (McCann 79).

As Carnival allows the alliance of high and low forces which are otherwise

not acceptable in the centralizing order of everyday life; so Claire invites her friends

and they arrange get- togethers as often as possible. In such gatherings solemnities

and etiquettes of normal life are overturned in order to give voice to the inner

repressed feelings and desires. In her everyday life, Claire is bound to take care of her

decorum and etiquettes, "How to greet? Handshake? Air kiss? Smile? What is there

possibly to be ashamed of? I have nothing to apologize for." (86) But the time she

spends with her friends enables her to forget these mannerisms for a while where

there is `no need for those niceties, the oohs and the ahhs, the embarrassments' (92).

Bakhtin states in Rabelais and His World that `The serious aspects of class culture are

official and authoritarian; they are combined with violence, prohibitions, limitations,

and always contain an element of fear and of intimidation Laughter, on the other

hand, overcomes fear, for it knows no inhibitions, no limitations' (90). For Bakhtin,

laughter indicates movement and possibility of new potentialities negating the fixed

and one-sided hierarchies. Bakhtin argues that Carnival helps to `revive' and `renew'

the realities (16). He also says in his essay Epic and Novel that Carnival has the

ability of:-

Making an object come up close, of drawing it into a zone of crude contact

where one can finger it familiarly on all sides, turn it upside down, inside out,

peer at it from above and below, break open its external shell, look into its

center, doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine

it freely and experiment with it. (23)

The purpose behind temporarily breaking the social order by Claire and her

friends is dual. On the one hand it provides them with a chance to express their

suppressed desires about their dead sons and the space which is created in their lives

by the death of their sons and to overcome the loneliness of their lives. On the other

hand, this momentary break up allows the emergence of a new social order and new

relations by encouraging free interaction between the unlikely people.

As Bakhtin puts it in this way in Rabelais and His World, "Thought and word

were searching for a new reality beyond the visible horizon of official philosophy.

Often words and thoughts were turned around in order to discover what they were

actually hiding, what was that other side. The aim was to find a position permitting a

look at the other side of established values, so that new bearings could be taken"

(272). The phrase `new bearings' refers to the possibility of different voices and

multiplicity of meaning as a result of Carnivalesque.

Similarly, we find the presence of this Carnivalistic rebelliousness in the

character of the tightrope walker. He also breaks up the rules and state laws in order

to reinforce his social identity. The dominant order of the society was restricting him

to manifest his true spirit freely. The stimulating force behind the brave act of

tightrope walking provides him a chance to create an alternate space within society.

His attempt is admired by Mrs. Soderberg too, because he challenges the laws of the

state quite openly. She thinks, "The intersection of a 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" (McCann 103). This aerial act provides the

tightrope walker a kind of freedom which is not accessible in the normal day to day

life. "Freedom was a word that everyone mentioned but none of us knew. There

wasn't much left for anyone to die for, except the right to remain peculiar" (131).

The social barriers force to present a one-sided picture of hierarchies but

Carnivalesque tends to present a never-ending chain of perspectives in which every

person is allowed to create a relative space for himself, `that a man could find

meaning anywhere' (134). The same idea is expressed in the text `but the miracle of

the actual world that things could be reconstituted and the dead could come alive'

(149). What the tightrope walker wants is to achieve beauty out of the ugly reality of

everyday life. "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" (161). "Everything

had a purpose, signal, meaning" (162). Another category of Carnivalesque is

sacrilegious, which allows those things and events to occur which present a creative

expression of life without the need of retribution or fear of penalty. In the case of

tightrope walker, he presents his artistry against the set standards of the society

without even thinking about the punishment. Within seconds he was pureness

moving, and he could do anything he liked. 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, and this

gave him the offhand vaunt to his walk. He was carrying his life from one side to the

other. The core reason for it all was beauty. Everything was rewritten when he was up

in the air. New things were possible with the human form. It went beyond

equilibrium." (164)

From the four Carnivalesque categories designed by Bakhtin, another is

eccentric behavior. It allows the unacceptable behavior which expresses one's natural

personality. The tightrope walk enables the tightrope walker to express his curbed

desires. He just wants to subvert and challenge the established norms of the society

through his walk. It grants him a chance to enter in a utopian realm to construct new

reality.

Carnival highlights the possibility of the birth of new world and proliferation

of meaning undermining the fixity of the governing order. "It's about being

connected, access, gateways, like a whispering game where if you get one thing

wrong you've got to go all the way back to the beginning" (197). Through this act he

tries to find out other possibilities beside the harsh realities of life. It also gives him

liberty to act according to his own will. "This was the city he had crawled into he

was surprised to find that there were edges beneath his own edge" (239). The reason

behind this state is explained in the text as "So much of it was about the old cure of

forgetting. To become anonymous to himself, have his own body absorb him. And yet

there were overlapping realities: he also wanted his mind to be in that place where his

body was at ease The sense of losing himself The logic became unfixed" (241).

Adelita visualizes his tightrope walking as a sacrilegious act; she thinks "challenging

God, a man above the cross rather than below who knows" (284). The official order

is something which has to be accepted in order to live in a society and when the

pressure builds up inside any person to take a momentary relief, it is achieved through

rebellion and subversion. It does not point towards the end of any reality but to a

beginning of a new perspective which one needs to reinforce his ideas and

consciousness.

Sometimes we just walk into something that is not for us at all. We pretend it

is. We think we can shrug it off like a coat, but it's not a coat at all, it's more

like another skin everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing

is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected." (305-6)

Jaslyn, the daughter of the hooker Jazzlyn, praises the beauty of this aerial act.

She is attracted to the photo of tightrope walker because the day when that accident

took the life of her mother and put an end to the shameful act of prostitution, the

tightrope walker attempted to find out beauty through his creative act. It teaches her

that "a life is lived in many ways so many unopened envelopes" (339). Michael

Holquist defines carnival in his book Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World , that carnival

tends to express otherness; it highlights the diversity of social relations and also to the

fact that `social roles and class relations are made not given, culturally produced

rather than naturally mandated' (89). Also in Rabelais and his World, Bakhtin says:-

A body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed: it is

continually built, created, and builds and creates another body. Moreover, the

body swallows the world and is itself swallowed by the world Eating,

drinking, defecation and other elimination (sweating, blowing of nose,

sneezing), as well as copulation, pregnancy, dismemberment, swallowing up

by another body all these acts are performed on the confines of the body and

the outer world, or on the confines of the old and new body. In all these

events, the beginning and the end of life are closely linked and interwoven.

(317)

Similarly, Bakhtin's category of familiar and free interaction between people helps

analyzing the character of Lara. The regret after the accident changes her life

completely. "This is not my life. These are not my cobwebs. This is not the darkness I

was designed for" (McCann 121). She is grieved at not taking responsibility of the

accident which took the lives of a young girl and a man. "She was full and pretty. No

eye shadow, no makeup, no pretence. She was smiling at me and asking me why I

had driven away, did I not want t talk to her, why didn't I stop, come, come, please,

did I not want to see the piece of metal that had ripped open her spine, and how about

the pavement she had caressed at fifty miles per hour?(130). She goes to the hospital,

takes Corrigan's possessions from there to return them to his relatives. "I had taken it

out of embarrassment, out of a sense of duty to my lie, an obligation to save face, and

perhaps even to save my hide" (136).

In projects at the Bronx, she meets with Ciaran, brother of Corrigan. She also

meets Adelita there who was cleaning up the apartment of Corrigan. She becomes

familiar with the people there, whom she would never be able to see if that accident

didn't happen. Among them were hookers, Adelita and Ciaran. It may be called

misalliance because Lara has spent her past life in the company of artists and friends

indulged in extravagant life. But now she has to get acquainted with the people she

never had the idea of meeting with. Her life has gone through a difficulty which has

empowered her to distinguish between the right and wrong. "You will be walking

someday in the dark and the truth will come shining through, and behind you will be

a life that you never want to see again." (145) She tells Ciaran that the accident took

place because of her reckless driving, by doing so she wants to release her sense of

guilt. She wants to be honest to Ciaran. "Things happen. We had not wanted them to

happen. They had arisen out of the ashes of the chance." (151)

Carnival provides a space in which opposites are fused together. It helps the

people to take a momentary relief from their noncarnival lives to give vent to their

unexpressed ideas and ideologies. It is a moment when life takes a turn upside down.

Her life has gone through a difficulty which has empowered her to distinguish

between the right and wrong. "You will be walking someday in the dark and the truth

will come shining through, and behind you will be a life that you never want to see

again" (145). She tells Ciaran that the accident took place because of her reckless

driving, by doing so she wants to release her sense of guilt. She wants to be honest to

Ciaran. "Things happen. We had not wanted them to happen. They had arisen out of

the ashes of the chance." (151)

Another aspect of Carnival deals with the inclusion of carnival and

noncarnival states of life; a position in which social hierarchies are turned upside

down and individuals try to manifest creative expressions out of their ordinary

experiences of life. Etherwest is a chapter in the novel, which introduces us with

Dennis, Gareth, Compton and Sam Peters who are telephone hackers. Though this

chapter is also linked with the rest of stories and narratives in the novel yet the thing

that makes this chapter distinguished from the other is the `behaviour' of these

hackers which is quite different from the voices introduced earlier. Although the main

focus of the hackers remain the rope walker and his magnificent creative ability but

the thing which is analogous between these hackers and tightrope walker is the

capability to construct something new and different from what is the order of the day.

Whereas other characters in the novel are linked with each other either consciously by

the single unifying force of wire walker or unconsciously by their social network,

these hackers try to hook up with others through their creative act of hacking.

It's a thing we do all the time for kicks, blue-boxing through the computer, to

Dial-A-Disc in London, say, or to the weather girl in Melbourne, 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 the programming. We loop and stack the calls,

route and reroute so we can't be traced. We go in first through an 8oo number

just 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. Even Dennis, who's worn his OCCIDENTAL DEATH

T-shirt ever since he came home from the war, got off on that one big-time

too. (McCann177)

The purpose that keeps them animated and energized is that this very act of

hacking makes them realize the fact that the world is very small and the social

networking bring them closer to everyone they like to know about. Sam says, "See,

when you're programming too, the world grows small and still. You forget about

everything else. You're in a zone. There are no backward glances. The sound and the

light 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 the only thing you care about is the next line

coming your way" (188). It also suggests the ongoing process of life where the end of

one thing does not allude towards the complete closure but the commencement of

some new reality.

Carnival provides a space in which opposites are fused together. It helps the

people to take a momentary relief from their noncarnival lives to give vent to their

unexpressed ideas and ideologies. It is a moment when life takes a turn upside down.

As Bakhtin points out the Carnivalesque images in Rabelais and His World as having

"undestroyable non-official nature, no dogma, no authoritarianism, no narrow-minded

seriousness can coexist with Carnival images; these images are opposed to all that is

finished and polished, to all pomposity, to every ready-made solution in the sphere of

thought and world outlook" (3).

It becomes clear that Carnival provides a free hand to express one's true

nature; it also makes possible the flexibility of meaning and by doing so it opens

multiple layers of perspectives regarding an issue. It gives an opportunity to live in

double worlds simultaneously; the real and inside the real world. Bakhtin defines it as

"It belongs to the borderline between art and life. In reality, it is life itself, but shaped

according to a certain pattern of play" (7). When a person attempts to subdue the real

authoritative world and to express his true self, he enters in the Carnival realm.

"During carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own

freedom. It has a universal spirit; it is the special condition of the entire world, of the

world's revival and renewal, in which all take part" (7). Bakhtin defines the

authoritative world as:-

The official feast asserted all that was stable, unchanging, perennial; the

existing hierarchy, the existing religious, political and moral values, norms

and prohibitions. It was the triumph of the truth already established the

predominant truth that was put forward as eternal and indisputable. (9)

"The utopian ideal and the realistic merged in this carnival experience, unique of its

kind. This temporary suspension, both ideal and real, of hierarchal rank created

during carnival time a special type of communication impossible in everyday life,

permitting no distance to those who came in contact with each other and liberating

from norms of etiquette and decency imposed at other times" (10). The "carnival

experience opposed to all that was ready-made and completed, to all pretence at

immutability, sought a dynamic expression; it demanded ever-changing, playful,

undefined forms" (11). The carnival relaxation is ambivalent also; "it is gay,

triumphant and at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies, it buries and

revives" (11-12). Carnival ambivalence is much more evident in the case of the

examination of the characters of tightrope walker (Mr. Soderberg) as ordinary and

extraordinary, high and low , and Tillie (Mrs. Soderberg) as prostitute and respectful

lady, Jazzlyn (Jaslyn) as old and new, dying and procreating.

Tightrope walker is an ordinary person who tries to subvert the reality in order to

reconstruct it. He wants to create something beautiful out of the disgusting realities of

everyday life. He tries to forget the harshness of life for some time to achieve the

beauty. "So much of it was about the old cure of forgetting. To become anonymous to

himself, have his own body absorb him. And yet there were overlapping realities, he

also wanted his mind to be in that place where his body was at ease"(McCann 241).

His aerial act provides him calmness and purity which enables him to get a relief

from the humdrum of life. He does not try to prioritize the state of calmness rather the

ugliness and grimness of the objective world gives him an opportunity to reconstruct

the world subjectively. "He wanted the noise, to build up some tension in his body, to

be wholly in touch with the filth and the roar"(238). Mr. Soderberg, a man of high

rank, a respectable judge in the New York City takes this walk in another way. He

thinks that the tightrope walker is a genius. Where the city has so many monuments to

be taken as a reference to the magnificent events, the tightrope walk has made the

walker a memorial in himself. "He had made himself a statue, but a perfect New York

one, a temporary one, up in the air, high above the city." (248) He admires the

attempt of the tightrope walker who has successfully created another reality for

himself. "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? A man

on the tightrope, a hundred and the ten stories in the air, can you possibly fucking

believe it?" (249). The reason for which he appreciates the walker is that he himself is

unable to create an alternate world for himself. He is a man engulfed by the worries

and tensions around him. His social position forces him to face the ugly social

realities but he does not find a way out of them, he remains unable to create a world

of momentary relief for himself. "Soderberg himself just missed the walk. It upset

him to think so, but he had, just by minutes, seconds even" (249). The harsh realities

around him remind him of his inability to create a world of relief. "Most people think

that he lived in some sort of mahogany heaven, that it was a highfalutin job, a

powerful career, but the true fact of the matter was that, beyond reputation, it didn't

amount to much at all" (252).

Similarly, the carnival ambivalence is apparent in the characters of Tillie and Mrs.

Soderberg. Claire Soderberg belongs to elite class of the society and is a respectable

lady. Deeply affected by the sad demise of her only son in the war, she tries to escape

this gruesome reality in the company of her friends and by smoking and drinking,

reconstructing an alternate world for her. "She takes another long haul, lets the smoke

settle in her lungs she has heard somewhere that cigarettes are good for grief" (81).

The carnival realm is not the end of one reality rather it is the construction of another

world beside the existing one which point towards the continuation of new

perspectives. Bakhtin describes the same thing in Rabelais and his World as:-

The carnival grotesque form exercises the same function: to consecrate

inventive freedom, to permit the combination of a variety of different

elements and their rapprochement, to liberate from the prevailing point of

view of the world, from conventions and established truths, from clichés, from

all that is humdrum and universally accepted. This carnival spirit offers the

chance to have a new outlook on the world, to realize the relative nature of all

that exists, and to enter a completely new order of things. (34)

Tillie, on the other hand is a street hooker. She says "Hooking was born in me"

(McCann 199). She has accepted her life in this business. She even tries to find out

beauty in it. "Don't let no one tell you that it's all shit and grime and honkypox on the

stroll. It's that, all right, sometimes, sure, but it's funny sometimes too. Sometimes

you got to do it, sometimes, for putting a smile on your face." (225) She talks about

her customers "The soldiers were my best clients. When they came back they just

wanted to pop But they needed loving. I was like a social service, word. Doing my

thing for America" (209). The only relief provided to her in her nasty routine is the

presence and sympathy of Corrigan. The death of her daughter and Corrigan leaves

her in great distress. She says, "I don't know who God is but I'm going to slap Him

stupid until He can't run away then I'll get Him to tell me why He done what He to

me and what He done to Corrie and why do all the good ones die and where is

Jazzlyn now and why she ended up there" (230). She is not ashamed of her life spent

in prostitution but for her daughter and grandbabies, she wants to protect them from

this miserable life. Claire reconstructs the world to escape from her dreadful present,

by diving into a peaceful realm to protect her from the harshness of the life and gives

a new meaning to her life. Tillie, contrarily, being at the outskirts of the society,

known as a hooker fails to give a meaning to her life. All she wants is to protect her

grandchildren from the horrible business. This attempt on her part presents her good

side and opens up new possibilities for her. Bakhtin puts it in this way in Rabelais

and his World:-

Actually the grotesque liberates man from all the forms of inhuman necessity

that direct the prevailing concept of the world. This concept is uncrowned by

the grotesque and reduced to the relative and the limited. Necessity, in every

concept which prevails at any time, is always one piece, serious,

unconditional, and indisputable. But historically the idea of necessity is

relative and variable. The principle of laughter and the carnival spirit on

which grotesque is based destroys this limited seriousness and all pretence of

an extra-temporal meaning and unconditional value of necessity. It frees

human consciousness, thought, and imagination for new potentialities (49).

The carnival ambivalence of old and new, dying and giving birth is also evident in the

characters of Jazzlyn and Jaslyn. Jazzlyn, a prostitute by profession is the mother of

Jaslyn. Her death not ended up just the tension from her life but it gives a new

meaning to the lives of her two daughters, Jaslyn and Janice. Her death unfolds a

peaceful and respectable life for her children. They are saved from the shackles of

disgusting and nasty life of strolling. What Corrigan used to do was to sympathize

with them because he thought of them as helpless and vulnerable. He wanted to take

them to a better life, to bring a positive change in their distressed lives. Ciaran says to

him, "The Lord's is too big to fit in their miniskirts No amount of sympathy is ever

going to change it They deserve nothing. They are not Magdalenes" (McCann 39).

This reminds us the merciful relationship of Christ with the prostitutes, especially

with Magdalene, a repented sinner. We find many references in the New Testament

regarding Christ's compassionate behavior with the prostitutes because they were

trapped in sin. Jesus demonstrated the world that human beings can become pious by

their practical concern for the poor. The poor signify not only the penniless members

of the society but it includes the oppressed, powerless, outcasts and foreigners also.

Bible says that if any sexual sinner repents and turns towards the new life of

righteousness by leaving her old immoral life, she is forgiven. The relation between

Corrigan and these hookers stands as a parallel between Christ and his kindness with

the prostitutes. Through her death, Jazzlyn opens up a new and blessed life for her

daughters. She has erased the element of shame from their lives through her death. As

Jaslyn thinks, "There is no such thing as shame, that life was about a refusal to be

ashamed." (McCann 329)

The theme of death and renewal, the combination of death and birth play an

important part in the system of Carnival ambivalence. This is discussed in Rabelais

and his World as:-

It seeks to grasp in its imagery the very act of becoming and growth, the

eternal incomplete unfinished nature of being. Its images present

simultaneously the two poles of becoming: that which is receding and dying,

and that which is being born; they show two bodies in one, the budding and

the division of the living cell (52).

What carnival propounds is that people live a double life. On the one hand

there is strict hierarchic order which tries to limit the human consciousness; on the

other hand, there is carnival realm which is free and boundless, providing infinite

perspectives and possibilities to the human consciousness. Carnival also points out

the collectivity; during Carnivalistic experience the suspension of time and space

gives an equal chance to every human being to participate and manifest his/her

ideology thus making them connected with each other. It makes possible the

existence of various ideas together because it does not predominates any single voice.

It clears the ground for the entrance of new ideas and beliefs. It helps to eliminate

alienation among people and brings them together to interact with each other. The

Carnival advocates the idea of holism; which means that the parts of a whole remain

in interaction. They cannot exist independently nor can they be understood without

the whole. John Muir says in My First Summer in the Sierra, "When we try to pick

out anything by itself we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe" (110). It

refers to the fact that everything is in relation with the other and so is the case with

human beings. In any society there is a chain of relationships between people and

they are connected with one another in direct or indirect manner. The interconnection

of people makes possible the existence of multiple points of views and perspectives

and it puts the meaning into play. It also undermines the old fixed and stable order

which inverts the possibility of new meanings. It is social in a way that it constructs

new networks of relations.

Andrew Robinson, a political theorist, points out in his article, In Theory

Bakhtin: Carnival against Capital, Carnival against Power, "Perhaps a complete

world cannot exist without carnival, for such a world would have no sense of its own

contingency and relativity" (2). Carnival puts the social order into play by

overcoming the established natural order. Thus Bakhtin takes Carnival as a positive

concept which intends to create new worlds alternatively. Though practical process of

Carnivalesque is no longer in vogue now a days yet it continue existing in the form of

new ideas, concepts and brainwaves among the people. It provides autonomy and

freedom to express one's creative ideas.

Carnival can also be taken as a process which is limitless and open-ended in

the novel's context. It is a kind of procedure that questions the authoritarianism and

brings it down to subvert it. This decrepitude of the established order does not means

its death rather the purpose of this degradation is to create new things out of it. It

ensures resurgence and renewal of the ideas. It causes death and birth simultaneously;

it overthrows the old order and constructs the new one. It is very much like a

rhizomatic pattern which multiplies and multiplies the meanings though they are all

held at center by a master signifier. As we see in the case of all the characters present

in the novel; everyone is there with his individual account of events told in a

particular subjective way making a whole and all these voices are governed by a

single artistic act of tightrope walking. This suggests that every person living in

society is walking his/her tightrope in one or another way.

According to Andrew Robinson, `

But, precisely because these patterns are

dissensual, holistic, reflexive, consciously relative and situated, they create a kind of

freedom. This is neither a repetition of monologue, nor its redemption through

100

recognition of its own contingency. It is an entirely different perspective in which

dialogue and immanence are actualized'. (5)

Let the Great World Spin presents an amalgamation of voices which also indicates the

`dialogic freedom'. This term is applicable to all the characters of the novel who by

their individual discourse and interconnection, construct new realms for themselves.

It helps them to live a double life according to their own will. Some of the characters

are under societal pressure and some are battling with their own demons. Still, they

create a separate world for themselves in order to get peace and relief. They belong to

different stratas of the society having different discourses but by uniting through the

process of Carnival, they get a chance to express their individual creative ideas

without any outer pressure. Bakhtin puts this dialogic freedom in his book Rabelais

and his World in this way:-

The influence of the century-old hidden linguistic dogmatism on human

thought, and especially on artistic imagery, is of great importance. If the

creative spirit lives in one language only, or if several languages coexist but

remain strictly divided without struggling for supremacy, it is impossible to

overcome this dogmatism buried in the depths of linguistic consciousness.

(471)

Dialogic discourse is very much like carnival for it also reconstructs the

meaning. As Shanti Elliot says in Carnival and Dialogue in Bakhtin's Poetics of

Folkore, "Bakhtin's presentation of carnival is not a prescription or a realization of

utopian ideals; it is itself an artistic response, ambivalent and aimed at transforming

not actual conditions but the ways of thinking of his hearers" (9). Similarly, McCann

101

leaves his novel open-ended which leaves the reader to extract whatever meaning

according to his/her consciousness. It puts the meaning into play through the equal

interaction between all the voices high and low, ordinary and extra-ordinary, old and

new. This interconnection between people is very much suggested in the epigraph of

the novel which sets the theme of the novel. As Liesl Schillinger quotes Aleksandar

Hemon's The Lazarus Project, in the article "American Literature: Words Without

Borders" it goes in this way, "All the lives we could live, all the people we will never

know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is what the world is." (n.pag.). It

indicates the mixture of many different worlds which exist in the novel trying to

reinforce their creative ideas in the world. McCann has successfully portrayed a

world which is spinning in a way that it brings together all the differing voices to

interact and construct new perspectives. As Colum McCann says in an interview with

Nathan Englander,

I wanted it to be a Whitmanesque song of the city, with everything in there

high and low, rich and poor, black, white and Hispanic. Hungary, exhausted,

filthy, vivacious, everything 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. (n.pag.).

102

Chapter 5

Conclusion

In my introduction to this thesis, I have discussed major concerns of Colum McCann

regarding his works of fiction, his influences and writing techniques. I have also

discussed Bakhtin's theory of Discourse with its multiple facets and the concepts

which will be used in the research of the thesis. It is argued that Bakhtin's theory

helps to highlight the socio-ideological tendencies in the text and also relates it to the

world in macrocosm. It points out the battling voices, hierarchies and forces in a

social network that are challenged and transformed by the individuals. Also, it

focuses on the ongoing process of life which is lived in so many ways. In the course

of this thesis, I have explored multiple voices and their particular purpose in the text

of Let the Great World Spin through the application of Bakhtin's concepts of

Polyphony and Heteroglossia. I have also explored the reasons which compel the

characters of the novel to create a relative world or `carnival realm' for them. For this

very purpose I have used the concept of Carnival and its ambivalent structure which

makes the existence of two parallel states possible. By this process, I have tried to

scrutinize every aspect of the text which relate and re-relate the ideas propounded by

every individual voice.

What I have tried to conclude through this research is that despite talking about the

themes of loss, memory, remembrance and cultural hybridization, McCann also

focuses on the society in which different forces are competing with each other and

through socializing individuals influence others and in turn are influenced by others

as well and this aspect of his fiction is not explored before. The strict and stringent

hierarchical order of any society sometimes proves to be unacceptable and intolerable

103

for the individuals and this force them to build a separate world for them which

allows them absolute freedom to act and aspire according to their own will. McCann

has also tried to convey this thing through the open-ended conclusion of his

profoundly rich novel. In chapter three, I have thoroughly examined the text through

the lens of Polyphony and Heteroglossia. As Andrew Robinson discusses in his

article `In Theory Bakhtin: Dialogism, Polyphony and Heteroglossia' that `Dialogism

in contrast recognises the multiplicity of perspectives and voices. It is also referred to

as `double-voiced' or `multi-voiced'. It is a `principle' which can become the main

referent of a particular aesthetic field. Each character has their own final word, but it

relates to and interacts with those of other characters. Discourse does not logically

unfold (as in analytical philosophy), but rather, interacts. This makes dialogical works

a lot more `objective' and `realistic' than their monological counterparts, since they

don't subordinate reality to the ideology of the author'(n.pag.)

The characters of the novel are not mere voices rather they are the voices who have

ideas to demonstrate. Bakhtin describes about the novel having Heteroglossia, in The

Dialogic Imagination as,

The novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types (sometimes

even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically

organized. The internal stratification of any single national language into

social dialects, characteristic group behavior, professional jargons, generic

language, languages of generations and age groups, tendentious languages,

languages of authorities, of various circles and of passing fashions, languages

that serve specific sociopolitical purposes of the day, even of the hour, (each

104

clay has its own slogan, its own vocabulary, its own emphases)- this internal

stratification present in any language at any given moment of its historical

existence is the indispensable prerequisite of the novel as a genre. (262-63)

In chapter four, I have discussed the concept of Carnival with its social and

utopian dimensions in context of the novel. In social context, it is argued that how

Carnival helps to subvert and transform the strict social hierarchies. This aspect is

argued to make connections with societies in general. It also enable us to understand

different contending forces and tendencies in social set ups. So far as the utopian

realm is considered, its exploration allows us to understand the inner persuasive

tendencies of an individual who can create a separate world for himself by capsizing

the dominant social forces. according to Keith M. Booker, Bakhtin's Carnival `has

representatives from different social and political strata thrust together in the same

physical and social space in such a way that normal hierarchies and class distinctions

are rendered ineffective, or at least unstable. This juxtaposition of various voices

allows for a polyphonic dialogue that highlights the differences among social groups

and generally calls into question the assumptions that would hold certain groups to be

ascendant over others'. (34)

It suggests that both Polyphony and Heteroglossia are the by-products of

Carnivalesque. As in Polyphony every voice is free from authorial influence, carnival

sets every individual free from authoritative culture. Bakhtin says in Problems of

Dostoevsky's Poetics that:-

"Characteristic of these genres are a multi-toned narration, the mixing of high

and low, serious and comic; they make wide use of inserted genres-letters, found

105

manuscripts, retold dialogues, parodies on the high genres, parodically reinterpreted

citations; in some of them we observe a mixing of prosaic and poetic speech, living

dialects and jargons (and in the Roman stage, direct bilingualism as well) are

introduced, and various authorial masks make their appearance" (108).

In tracing dialogic relationship in the text I have elaborated the selective concepts

from Bakhtin's theory of Discourse. It will help to comprehend both the novel in

particular and the theory in general. By keeping the research limited to socio-cultural

aspects, and by making its connection in understanding the social order in general, I

have tried to construct a relation between the fictional reality and the factual reality. I

have tried to argue that McCann's work is an excellent elaboration of the social order

with all its constructing elements. He has masterfully managed the two temporal

states in the novel by keeping his characters in the same social order. Through this

thesis, I have tried to justify that Bakhtin's theory is an appropriate methodological

framework to explore social heterogeneity in the text and the thesis further helps to

understand the concepts of the theory as well. In a nutshell, McCann's Let the Great

World Spin presents a powerful commentary on the unfinalisability of human life and

it throws an ample light on the human capability to destabilize the persisting social

order in one or the other way.

106

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Lahore College for Women University,

Lahore

JAIL ROAD, LAHORE PAKISTAN. TEL: 042-99203801- 09 Ext. 207

Diary No: 22

Dated:

18-

09-2014

To Whom It May Concern

This is to certify that thesis of Miss Fizza Rasheed Reg. No:

12-M/LCWU-22869

Session 2012-14, Department of English, LCWU, Lahore, titled "

Social

Heterogeneity and Narrative Techniques A Dialogic Reading of Let the Great

World Spin by Colum McCann

" has been processed and checked by the software

provided by HEC (Turnitin). The thesis checking and reporting was performed by Ms

Ammara Iqbal, Lecturer (English). This thesis has four chapters and each chapter as

well as the conclusion has been checked individually. The obtained percentage is

10%.

Chapter No.1 = 26%