An Unrecognizable Figure: Transatlantic's Douglass & McCann's Truncated Sentences

[alice wellintown]

There is wonderful recording of Danny Glover acting and reciting
Douglass's famous speech, "What to a Salve is the Fourth of July"
(1852). Listen to it or watch it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb_sqh577Zw

or listen to or watch the same speech acted by James Earl Jones, here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJL3mho0Lag

We know that Douglass did not use his firey peotic language in
ordinary context.

 But read his novels, his lectures, his sermons, his narratives, his
pieces on countless topics and you can't reconcile the language, and
the mind, the personality, the man we know from his letters and his
photographs with the figure in Transatlantic.

In photographs, Douglass writes, a man looks dead, a ghost, a still
figure posing.

In Transatlantic, Douglass, his fear subsiding as he takes in the
horror, the ghosts, the shades of humanity passed over by a literal
reading of a modest proposal, as he sees the poor Irish who live
underground, naked and shoeless, and starving and covered in sores,
much as Douglass did when still a plantation slave, a child naked and
hungry,  before he had the great fortune to be sent to Baltimore where
he first encountered the narrow back Irish, the American kids who gave
him words for food, which he had plenty of...Douglass only muses in
muted reveries and hides under his cap.

MCCann slips in some Douglass we know, but for the most part he is a
photograph, a Daguerre, a statue like figure who make a neat cut of
irony only.

NOTE in 1861 Douglass commented on the photographic process. see The
Norton Critical Edition of _The House of the seven Gables_ and
probably other places.