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ABSTRACT
The article focuses on Colum McCann’s 2020 novel Apeirogon, which tells the stories of an unlikely friendship of two bereaved fathers, a Palestinian Bassam Aramin and a Jew Rami Elhanan. I argue that in its experimental form, the novel comes to imagine a way beyond the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which is here shown to be predicated on what Achille Mbembe terms necropolitics. Having discussed Mbembe’s idea, I proceed to demonstrate that in its continuous juggling of hope and despair and its use of mathematics to formally structure the novel, McCann rejects the politics of hatred, replacing it with a mind-set of shared suffering and mutual understanding.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. A relevant case is Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower, which he argues represents a mode of “nondisciplinary power” imposed by the authority on “man-as-species” through establishing rules for the proper maintenance of the body in “a sort of homeostasis” (Foucault 244). This imposition results in the bodily person becoming a domain of control retained by means of mechanisms that seemingly offer to take care of the well-being of the population (health-preserving institutions, insurance companies and savings accounts are among Foucault’s examples) but in fact serve to ensure its homogenization (Foucault 244–47).
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Wit Pietrzak
Wit Pietrzak is Professor of British Literature at the University of Łódź, Poland, he specializes in modernist Irish and British poetry, and theory of literature. His recent publications include “All Will Be Swept Away”: Dimensions of Elegy in the Poetry of Paul Muldoon, Constitutions of Self in Contemporary Irish Poetry and The Critical Thought of W. B. Yeats.