Abstract
This chapter addresses the ethical implications of TransAtlantic’s multiperspectivity and of the novel’s multidirectional, yet convergent, structure. Colum McCann’s oceanic storyworld is focalized through both male historical figures from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and generations of fictional female figures who use or are impacted by the trade route. Through the telling of fictional Hannah Carson’s overarching homodiegetic multigenerational story which has male historical figures encountering female fictional characters and vice versa, the work gestures towards a variegated whole comprised of all the aligned voices effectively assembled together. By combining narrative threads concerning slavery and Irish and African colonialism, TransAtlantic disputes the identity politics permeating accounts of communal trauma. The narrative friction between memoir and fictional testimony instead facilitates readerly engagement in historical debate.
The edges of the lough are never watertight, either to the land or the sea. The tides flow in and out. Boats and memory, too.
TransAtlantic
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Singer, S. (2017). The Zigzag Trajectory Through Time of Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic . In: Martínez-Alfaro, M., Pellicer-Ortín, S. (eds) Memory Frictions in Contemporary Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61759-6_4
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