"Upground and belowground topographies": The Chronotopes of Skyscraper and Subway in Colum McCann's New York novels before and after 9/11

Back down under the earth, where you belong. [. . .]. He could make a map of those words, beginning at the B and ending at the g—where all beginning begins and ends—and they would make the strangest of upground and belowground topographies.

(TSoB 139)

Sometimes you've got to go up to a very high floor to see what the past has done to the present.

(LtGWS 306)

In Colum McCann's This Side of Brightness (1998), the African American former sandhog, Nathan Walker, repeatedly invokes the blues song, "Looking Down at Up," recorded most famously by Big Bill Broonzy in 1940: "And he sang this song which is a blues song which don't go with no fiddle, and it goes: Lord I'm so lowdown I think I'm looking up at down."¹ In so doing, Walker attaches a spatial connotation (being "down") to the various traumas that afflict him and his descendants over the seventy-five-year span of the novel. The connection between space and trauma is not surprising since trauma is often configured as an alienation or estrangement from oneself or one's sense of emotional and psychological well-being. More interesting, I think, are the ideas conveyed by the two epigraphs to this article, one from This Side of Brightness, the other from McCann's post-9/11 novel, Let the Great World Spin (2009), both of which emphasise the inextricability of time from space in conceptions of trauma. In the first, we see the juxtaposition of beginnings and ends with "upground and belowground topographies"; in the second, the "very high floor" provides a vantage point from which to consider the past's interrelationship with the present. In other words, both novels qualify the blues song's interest in trauma and space (down/up) by incorporating a distinctly temporal dimension.

This article examines This Side of Brightness alongside Let the Great World Spin, arguing that McCann's emphasis on the interrelatedness of spatial and temporal dimensions of trauma offers a radical critique of the way in which much post-9/11 fiction and criticism leaves unchallenged trauma's temporal aspects. Trauma theory is characterized by an insistence on temporal rupture, a clear sense of before-and-after that is perceptible both in fictional texts about 9/11 and in critical commentary on those fictional texts. Building on Richard Crownshaw's recent work, I want to argue for the importance of acknowledging the inextricability of time from space in McCann's treatment of trauma, a connection which is illustrated most convincingly through his deployment of the chronotopes of skyscraper and subway. Through his conceptualization of the subway and skyscraper as spaces which can and must be viewed as part of a historical continuum, McCann undermines the notion of 9/11 as a moment of rupture. By blurring the boundary between these "upground and belowground topographies," which are endowed with distinct temporal resonances, McCann destabilizes the politically-suspect insistence on temporal rupture so pervasive in post-9/11 discourse and, instead, challenges readers to acknowledge the demonstrable continuities between pre- and post-9/11 moments.

Looking Up at Down: The Time and Space of Trauma

Recent scholarship has attempted to map the relationship between time, space and trauma in post-9/11 fiction. Most notably, an article by Richard Gray, in which he outlines the aesthetic and conceptual limitations of most post-9/11 fiction, appeared alongside a short rejoinder by Michael Rothberg in American Literary History 21.1 (2009). Whereas authors of trauma narratives should develop artistic strategies that do justice to the strangeness of the post-traumatic moment, Gray finds that the reliance on romantic and familial conflicts in such texts means that they "simply assimilate the unfamiliar into familiar structures."² As a result, "the crisis [becomes], in every sense of the word, domesticated."³ Instead, Gray lauds the work of immigrant writers in the US who, over the past twenty years, have been engaged in literary acts of "bearing witness to the...