The Center Can Hold: Colum McCann's Apeirogon and W. B. Yeats's "The Second Coming"

Abstract

The Center Can Hold:Colum McCann's Apeirogon and W. B. Yeats's "The Second Coming" Kathleen Costello-Sullivan (bio) colum mccann's ambitious 2020 novel, Apeirogon, takes its name from a geometrical shape with a "countably infinite number of sides."1 As a controlling metaphor, this concept of the simultaneously finite and infinite parallels a structural, intertextual reference to One Thousand and One Arabian Nights—what one critic calls "Scheherazade's famous telling of Middle Eastern folktales in order to ward off death."2 Both references highlight that this novel, which explores the story of two men's grief and their campaign for peace against the backdrop of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is about chaos and order, the controlled and the uncontrollable—and it pursues this tension thematically as well as structurally. I want to consider another reference that I believe has thus far been overlooked, but which offers a powerful intertextual gesture toward the author's intentions: McCann's structural indebtedness to W. B. Yeats's poem "The Second Coming." Readings of Apeirogon have focused predominantly on the novel's format, which layers an array of facts with specific details from the two men's lives in an expansive web that signals the complexity of their sociopolitical context. However, while it is an ambitious text built out of 1,001 chapters—some only a sentence or a phrase long—and layered with self-referential, intertextual, and imagistic connectivities, Apeirogon is nonetheless based on a firm, unmoving, and stable narrative center. Its series of chapters radiate out from [End Page 41] a thematic and structural heart: the fragile but obdurate relationship between two men, grounded in a shared grief. In this respect, Apeirogon creates an inter-textual conversation with "The Second Coming." It uses the structure and imagery of the earlier poem, such as a "widening gyre" and birds, and the common geographical location to engage Yeats's vision.3 McCann displays once again his hopeful faith in empathy and relationships as stabilizing resources against conflict and trauma. Apeirogon is a biofictional text.4 It explores the history and relationship of two real men, Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan—a Palestinian and Israeli, respectively—both of whom lost their young daughters, Abir and Smadar, to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The novel is based on interviews with the two, who now campaign internationally for resolution to this entrenched conflict. It also relates their respective histories as young men: Aramin spent seven years in an Israeli prison, while Elhanan fought in the Israeli army and was subsequently apolitical—until his daughter's death. Yet, as noted above, this is not a simple or linear narrative. As Ben Libman observes in his review of the novel, "Apeirogon proceeds to build an archive of seemingly disparate facts, anecdotes, and myths around the story of these two 'combatants for peace'" (a point to which I will return).5 The "chapters" count up from 1 to 500, followed by chapter 1001, which is a synopsis of the events of the novel (i.e., the meeting in Beit Jala where McCann was among an audience convened to listen to Aramin and Elhanan's stories). The narrative then counts down again from 500 to 1. Chapter 500 in both halves of the novel are the respective testimonies of Elhanan and Aramin. As Julie Orringer notes, "By placing them at the center of the book, and by setting them off formally, McCann [End Page 42] indicates their primary importance in the novel."6 The author also conspicuously disappears in that narrative moment, foregrounding his subjects' points of view and privileging their stories within his own.7 Outside of that stable core, however, there is a lot happening. Certain chapters and concepts mirror one another in the two halves of the novel. In addition to the men's parallel testimonies, for example (both at 500), Elhanan's admission that "Arabs were just a thing to [him], remote and abstract and meaningless," mirrors Aramin's observation that "we [Arabs] need to continually prove that we are human beings" (220–21, 237). Both men also identify a parallel moment when their worldviews were irrevocably changed. On observing an Arab parent grieving...