Narrative Form and Undersea Network in Colum McCann’s Twist

At the very bottom of the ocean, thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable transmit the signals that make our global information sphere possible. These slender, flexible wires crisscross the ocean floor, linking continents and carrying almost 100 percent of the world’s Internet traffic (Starosielski xii). As of 2024, around 530 active submarine cables form a vast undersea network spanning over 1.4 million kilometers globally—a digital infrastructure whose environmental cost is frequently underestimated, from seabed disturbance and carbon release to electromagnetic impacts on marine life.1 Messages, images, news, financial transactions, and fragments of personal and collective lives move along these submerged lines at the speed of light. Yet for most of us, the existence of this planetary infrastructure remains largely unknown: the cables lie buried not only beneath water and sand but also beneath the surface of everyday awareness. Underwater cables are especially well-positioned to address the conventional “invisibility” of infrastructure2: in Caroline Levine’s terms, for example, “[q]uite a few infrastructures are literally hidden from view, like […] the global network of undersea cables that even communications experts do not know are there” (The Activist Humanist 86). In her study of submarine cables, The Undersea Network (2015), Nicole Starosielski warns that this invisibility “poses a threat to the cables themselves and at times to the people who use them,” emphasizing how this lack of awareness extends far beyond the general public to include policymakers, government regulators, corporate customers, politicians, and other uninformed people directly responsible for infrastructure funding and maintenance (9–10). In this article, I focus on how contemporary narrative can leverage the invisibility of infrastructure to self-reflexively engage with similarly out-of-sight yet urgent topics, such as climate change and digital colonialism.