Traces of Hunger in Colum McCann's Dancer

Abstract

Irish Writer Colum McCann introduces Rudi, the protagonist in Dancer – a fictionalized account inspired by ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev’s biography. Impersonating what McCann coined as the “century’s greatest exile” (Cusatis, 2011, p. 125), Rudi invites us to revisit Nureyev’s saga, starting from Rudi’s childhood during World War II in Russia to his stardom after he defected to the West. McCann organizes Rudi’s life in a pendular parallelism between the scarcity and the excesses lived by the protagonist in economic, emotional, social, and cultural contexts and between the East and the West. Besides the theme of exile, hunger is another aspect of Dancer that is related to the Irish experience. Considering these transnational themes, the present work approaches foodways and hunger in this novel as a “system of communication” (Roland Barthes, 1997) to analyse the sensuous, life-hungry protagonist in the West, including the indulgent lifestyle that accompanied it. Various gastronomic items, events, and behaviours will be approached connotatively to contemplate symbolic eating and converse with physical and metaphorical hunger. Throughout this work, the psychological and bodily instances of the character will dialogue with the political panorama that paved the way for his choices.