“The Human World Is Made of Stories” Postmodernism and the Planetary in the Novels of David Mitchell

Home , 2010 Man Booker Prize, A Matter of Chance, Black Swan Green, Cloud Atlas (novel), David Mitchell (author), David Mitchell (lawyer)

“The Human World is Made of Stories” Postmodernism and the Planetary in the Novels of David Mitchell

Kelly Frame

A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

UNSW Canberra at ADFA

School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences

November 7, 2016

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Acknowledgements

I would like to express my most emphatic gratitude to David Mitchell, who took time out of his demanding schedule to meet with me, and who treated my work with the utmost sincerity, interest, and enthusiasm. I will remain an avid “uber-reader” of Mr Mitchell’s fiction, as three and a half years of intense study has not quelled my fascination with his writing.

I would also like to acknowledge and give most humble thanks to my incomparable supervisor Heather, who has devoted the kind of energy, passion, and critical rigour to my work that PhD students only ever dream of and rarely experience. She has been a true mentor and friend.

The HASS faculty has given me superlative support during my years at UNSW (Canberra). Particular thanks to Nicole Moore, Christina Spittel, David Lovell, Shirley Ramsey, Deane Peter-Baker and Bernadette McDermott, who were unfailingly kind and always made time for me above and beyond the call of duty. Special thanks to my co- supervisor Neil Ramsey – your feedback, earnest conversation and encouragement have been invaluable.

Thanks to my friends Ben King and Rebekka Leary, my comrade and office mate Emily Robertson – the Cassowary to my Anteater – and to Umut Uzgut and my English partner-in-crime, BeiBei Chen. Love and thanks to my sister Megan and my nieces Lily and Imogen.

I am eternally grateful to my partner Ned, who has weathered my tears and doubts with love, optimism and empathy.

Finally, heartfelt thanks to my wonderful parents, Tom and Helen, without whom I would never have been able to embark on this journey. Your belief in me and the value of this project is a blessing I’ll always be grateful for.

List of Publications

Journal Articles:

Frame, Kelly. “Cloud Atlas: Cosmopolitan Exemplar or Critique?” New Scholar 4, no.1 (2016): 25-36.

Frame, Kelly. “The Last Place: The Uncanny Australia of David Mitchell”. Antipodes: A Global Review of Australian/New Zealand Literature. [Forthcoming – July 2017]

Frame, Kelly. “‘The Strong Do Eat’: David Mitchell and Herman Melville – a Study in Intertextuality.” Australasian Journal of American Studies 34, no. 1 (2015): 17-29.

Encyclopaedia Entries:

Frame, Kelly Susan. "Black Swan Green". The Literary Encyclopedia. June 27, 2014. http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=25301.

Frame, Kelly Susan. "number9dream". The Literary Encyclopedia. June 5, 2014. http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=25300.

Frame, Kelly Susan. "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet". The Literary Encyclopedia. July 29, 2014. http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=29673.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Mitchell’s Multiverse and the Figuration of the Author ..... 7

1. Planetary Postmodernism and David Mitchell ...... 17

I. Situating David Mitchell ...... 17

II. Postmodernism and the “New Political Art” ...... 28

II. Theorising the Planetary, the Anthropocene, and Cosmopolitanism ...... 36

2. Ghostwritten: Modes of Being in a Postmodern World ...... 49

3. Hyperrealism and Locating the “Real Eiji Miyake” in number9dream ...... 84

I. Postmodernism in number9dream ...... 86

II. The Planetary in number9dream ...... 103

4. “History Admits No Rules”: Metafiction and the Future of the Planet in Cloud Atlas ...... 114

5.“A One You”: Expression and Identity in Black Swan Green ...... 142

6. Reclaiming History in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet ... 166

7. Invisible Wars and Planetary Saviours in The Bone Clocks ...... 188

Conclusion: Slade House and the Planetary Mandate for Mitchell’s “über-readers” ...... 216

Bibliography ...... 228

Introduction: Mitchell’s Multiverse and the Figuration of the Author

“Souls cross the skies o’time, Abbess’d say, like clouds crossin’ skies o’the world.” - Zachry

“What wouldn’t I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable. To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.” – Timothy Cavendish1

A “moon-grey” cat materialises at significant junctures in David Mitchell’s fiction, and gently lures the protagonists to safety or warns them of danger. The cat appears to be a timeless being. He visits an imprisoned midwife in eighteenth century Japan, rescues an English journalist from a bomb blast during the Gulf War, and is discovered lifeless in a London alleyway in the 1980s only to reappear alive and well in that same alleyway forty years later. The benign intrusions of the cat – some more successful than others – are meaningful moments of serendipity that often inspire Mitchell’s characters to be introspective amidst the chaos of events.2 The cat can be read as an avatar of Mitchell himself, a signifier of the author-function, and a symbol of the connections that bind Mitchell’s various narratives into a fictional multiverse – which has been collectively described by the author himself as a “macronovel” or an “Überbook”.3 If any one motif defines Mitchell’s novels, it is, I suggest, the interconnectivity between his characters and their tales, triumphs and traumas. When asked about the reasons for his characters’ reappearances in different worlds, Mitchell explained:

I grow fond of these characters I bring into being. In my adult life I have spent more weeks in the company of people such as Timothy Cavendish or Jacob de Zoet than I have with my own flesh-and- blood parents or brother. Letting them dissolve into nothingness feels too much like abandoning an inconvenient cat by a reservoir. There’s a practical reason as well – the example I use is Falstaff, though it works just as well for a character like Captain Jack Sparrow: because Falstaff exists in the history plays, our perception of him in The Merry Wives of Windsor is different and enriched.

1 Both quotations from David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas, (London: Sceptre, 2004), 318, 389. 2 The three examples occur, respectively, in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, The Bone Clocks, and Slade House. The feline corpse in an alleyway is a portent of the deadly presence residing in Slade House. This warning is not understood by Nathan, the small boy who finds the cat, and he meets his death after entering the house. 3 Cited in Wyatt Mason, “David Mitchell, the Experimentalist.” New York Times Magazine, June 25, 2010, accessed June 12, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/magazine/27mitchell-t.html?_r=0. See also Mitchell, David. “On Reappearing Characters”. The Bone Clocks. Hodder & Stoughton General Division, (London, 2014), 620. We invested emotions in him during his time with young Hal, and these emotions are still there in Windsor. Belief in a character and his milieu is retentive and transferable. This is why sequels exist.4 This overtly sentimental justification for building a fictional world emphasises an author’s invitation to his or her reader to embark upon a relationship with a character. In the short essay “On Reappearing Characters”, which was included in the British edition of The Bone Clocks, Mitchell more facetiously cites “self-indulgence”, “cowardice”, “sloth”, and “envy” as his principal motivations for including established characters in later novels. He expresses fondness for his own creations and the desire to explore “new aspects of their personalities”.5 The writer is not alone in developing a fondness for fictional beings, as readers also develop intimacy and relationships with the characters they discover in texts. The act of reading is one of self-discovery; readers arguably seek to identify with a character or their struggles. Narratives, as Frank Kermode argues, assist us in making meaning of existence by arranging human life in ways that imbue it with purpose. Fiction, especially eschatological fiction, expresses “a need to speak humanly of a life’s importance in relation to [the world] – a need in the moment of existence to belong, to be related to a beginning and to an end”.6 Kermode further contends that the crisis of humanity is the perpetual state of being in the “middest”, as he terms it, in which humans find themselves “in medias res”, when they are born and “in mediis rebus” when they die.7 It is the task of fiction, he asserts, to provide a panorama of life where “ends are consonant with origins”.8 In order to embrace this panorama “we project ourselves – a small, humble elect, perhaps – past the End, so as to see the structure whole, a thing we cannot do from our spot of time in the middle”.9 Mitchell’s objective, I argue in this thesis, is to explore this “middling” state of affairs and how this state informs the way we conceive of social change. I argue that Mitchell’s fiction breaks ground in postmodern literature. He embraces the incredulity to metanarratives and the metafictional aesthetic that have been generally understood as features of postmodern writing, and from this position he examines how humans seek to understand, control, and find meaning from the narratives we construct about “the

4, David Mitchell, “David Mitchell, The Art of Fiction No. 204,” Interview by Adam Begley, The Paris Review, 2010, accessed June 14, 2012, http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6034/the-art-of-fiction- no-204-david-mitchell. 5 David Mitchell. “On Reappearing Characters”, 619. 6 Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, (Oxford University Press, 2000), 4. 7 Ibid., 7. The Latin terms mean, respectively, “Into the middle of things” and “in the middle of things”. 8 Ibid., 5. 9 Ibid., 8. structure whole”. Mitchell’s narratives of the past, the future, society and the environment inform the ways in which humans engage with the planet and interact with each other. His stories challenge the reader to reconsider grand narratives of fate in the hope of forestalling what he perceives as the encroaching environmental apocalypse.

The planetary scope of Mitchell’s novels, both temporal and spatial, is of such vastness that the place of the individual is effectively rendered minute. Despite the expansive timelines traversed in the novels, the achronological assemblage of narratives appears to complicate a sense of “the structure whole”. The structure exists and every element (including humanity) is connected in diffuse ways. It is in this grand context that Mitchell offers a series of tales focussing on a number of individuals, some of whom revisit the reader over the course of his works. The constantly shifting focus between macrocosm and microcosm prompts reflection on the significance of the individual and how he or she may (or may not) impact upon the “structure whole”. Mitchell’s characters frequently suffer alienation from their world – they experience being in the middle of things but do not always feel as if they are a meaningful, even clearly-defined part of things. It is no accident that so many of the narratives that feature in Mitchell’s oeuvre are bildungsromane or bildungsreise. His characters struggle to make sense of the world, of reality and of themselves. In this struggle they turn to narratives and metanarratives of truth in order to find clarification and validation of their identities. They also turn to the stories of others with whom they identify – and this impulse most notably informs the structure and events featured in Mitchell’s best-known work, Cloud Atlas. The revenance of characters such as Marinus, Subhataar, Luisa Rey, Timothy Cavendish, Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck, and Neal Brose is not a shallow literary device designed as in-jokes for loyal readers, but a metafictional engagement with the core concern of his novels: the manner in which narratives define and connect us, either for good or for ill. My investigation into the fiction of David Mitchell proceeds from this foundational premise.

David Mitchell was born at Southport in 1969 and spent much of his childhood in Malvern, Worcestershire. He has revealed that he did not speak until he was five, and developed a stammer from the age of seven.10 He attended the University of Kent, completing a Bachelor of English and American Literature and a Master of Arts in

10 Adam Augustyn, “David Mitchell,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, November 30, 2015, accessed September 1, 2016, https://www.britannica.com/biography/David-Mitchell. Comparative Literature, his thesis focusing on the postmodern novel. In Mitchell’s post- university years he travelled widely, and during this period he taught English as a second language in Sicily and Hiroshima. The wanderlust of his twenties has inspired many scenarios in his fiction, although it is his extended residency in Japan (over a period of eight years) that had the most significant impact upon his identity as a writer.11 Communication and miscommunication are central and recurring themes throughout his fiction, this preoccupation being informed not only by his own disfluency but also from his experience of raising a son diagnosed with autism. In a rare departure from the role of fiction writer, Mitchell, with his wife Keiko Yoshida, translated Naoki Higashida’s autobiographical work, The Reason I Jump. This is the memoir of an adolescent boy living with autism. Mitchell cites the book as having “allowed me to round a corner in our relationship with our son”, as well as benefiting a wider readership.12

To date, Mitchell has published seven novels – Ghostwritten (1999), number9dream (2001), Cloud Atlas (2004), Black Swan Green (2006), The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010), The Bone Clocks (2014), and Slade House (2015). He has also produced seventeen short stories, written two opera librettos (Wake with the composer Klaas de Vries in 2010 and Sunken Garden with Michel van der Aa in 2013), composed a scene of dialogue for Kate Bush’s Before the Dawn show, and delivered (via Twitter) the story The Right Sort (which inspired and was partially adapted in Slade House). Most recently, he has contributed to the Future Library time capsule project by writing the novel From Me Flows What You Call Time.13 There have been two adaptations of his fiction into film – Cloud Atlas (2012) and “The Voorman Problem” (2013). The latter was adapted from a section in number9dream and was nominated for the Academy Award for “Best Live Action Short Film” in 2014.14

11 Mitchell reflects on his life in Japan and how this has influenced his writing in a brief piece entitled David Mitchell, “Japan and my writing,” Japan Railway & Transport Review 42, (2005), 60. 12 David Mitchell, “Introduction” in Naoki Higashida, The Reason I Jump, (London: Sceptre, 2013), 10- 11. 13 Katie Paterson, “Future Library”, Future Library, accessed August 9, 2016, http://www.futurelibrary.no/. Future Library is a time capsule project created by the Scottish artist Katie Paterson. Margaret Atwood contributed the first story to be added to the capsule, with a different author contributing a new story on an annual basis for a century. It is intended that in 2114 the capsule will be exhumed and the stories will be published and made accessible for the first time. 14 Mark Gill directed the film which he also co-wrote with the producer, Baldwin Li. Over the past decade there has been a steady increase in academic interest in Mitchell’s fiction, the details of which I will discuss in the first chapter of this thesis. He has been lauded as a major voice in contemporary literature alongside such writers as Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, and A. S. Byatt.15 Mitchell’s appeal transcends conventional boundaries demarcating literary fiction and popular fiction. However, inevitably, Mitchell’s work has not been immune to criticism. A number of his storylines are written in the mode of fantasy, this aspect of his work having been met with scepticism, most notably by James Wood of the New Yorker.16 Mitchell has responded to his critics in interviews and also, in somewhat ludic fashion, by caricatures of literary critics such as the character of Richard Cheeseman in The Bone Clocks. Mitchell appears increasingly indifferent to his place in the hierarchy of literature. This attitude possibly derives from his professed sensitivity to unfavourable critical reviews.17 According to his own statements, Mitchell’s agenda in storytelling is informed by the perceived experience of the reader:

One of the questions I always try to keep in the front of my mind is to ask why would anyone want to read this, and to try to find a positive answer for that. People’s time, if you bought it off them, is expensive. Someone’s going to give you eight or ten hours of their life. I want to give them something back, and I want it to be an enjoyable experience.18 Commenting on Mitchell’s stated priorities of the value of entertainment, James Wood has suggested that this detracts from what he (Woods) refers to as “the spirit of the

15 Patrick O’Donnell, A Temporary Future: The Fiction of David Mitchell, (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 3. 16 James Wood, “Soul Cycle: David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks,” The New Yorker, September 8, 2014, accessed October 4, 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/08/soul-cycle. In his review of The Bone Clocks, Wood argues that ‘The fantasy rigs the narrative, so that there is something wearingly formulaic whenever Mitchell stages, as he regularly does, a spot of “realistic” scepticism’. 17 David Mitchell, interview by Kelly Frame, 25 May 2015, Sydney. I asked Mitchell if he had developed a “thick skin” as an author, and he replied, largely in jest, that: “My agent gives me the name of the publication and then says if it is positive then that’s obliging and I want to know the name so if I run into them I know what the other person knows. If it’s disobliging then I want the name so I can change it slightly and then put that name in my next book, make something awful happen to them, really awful, and if the critic reads that as well, then the critic goes away not knowing if I’ve put a terrible curse on them and their offspring. It makes you feel better; it’s in lieu of a thick skin. I’m not sure if there is a thick skin for that one. There’s certainly affectation of a thick skin. But egotism and vanity is kind of an armour – “of course it’s ridiculous because I’m brilliant” – but that’s very expensive in terms of cutting you off from the mother-lode. People don’t trust their stories with a tosser and a conniving patroniser, and as I mentioned at the beginning of the conversation, people won’t speak to me if they suspect a tosser, if they sense a Crispin Hershey. So that’s the problem with that. So this is the sort of methodology that I have evolved”. 18 David Mitchell quoted in James Wood, “Soul Cycle: David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks”. novel” as a genre.19 I would dispute the strict demarcation between the popular and the literary implicit in Wood’s remark and instead concur with Nicholas Blincoe’s review of Ghostwritten in which he declares: “Ghostwritten fails insofar as it resembles a 20th- century literary novel, but succeeds stunningly where it imagines a literature for the 21st century”.20 Sarah Dillon has similarly read Mitchell’s novels as expressive of their contemporary moment:

Very different to Henry James’ nineteenth-century house of fiction at the windows of which different authors stand, viewing in their own way the ‘real’ world, Mitchell’s twenty-first century house of fictions stands alone, a universe unto itself, inhabited not by the author but by his cast of characters who move from room to room, unencumbered by division in time and space.21 I endorse Blincoe’s and Dillon’s characterisation of Mitchell’s fiction, a position I defend over the course of this thesis.

An attempt to situate Mitchell within the world of contemporary literature is complicated further by the influence of other media – especially film and television – on his work. In conversation with me, he acknowledged that he differentiates between contemporary writers and their predecessors according to the dominant dramatic art forms of their respective times. Associating early to mid-twentieth-century novelists with the theatre, he observes that:

We write books for film and TV, we edit for film and TV, we make scenes shorter, we start a little bit at the beginning, a little bit at the end […] The 60s thing where the writer writes the exit and the entry, we don’t do that anymore. They came from the theatre; we can direct the film. So there’s a thesis somewhere on the influence of film on the modern novel.22 It is not within the purview of this thesis to identify the influence of film on the modern novel per se, however, an analysis of Mitchell’s fiction must acknowledge the televisual characteristics of his work. Discussing his own reappearing characters, he has alluded to “a sort of envy of the long-form small-screen narrative, or the series of seasons”.23 Equally worthy of consideration is Mitchell’s place in a cultural moment that privileges

19 James Wood, “Soul Cycle: David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks”. 20 Nicholas Blincoe, “Spirit that Speaks”, The Guardian, August 22, 1999. https://www.theguardian.com/books/1999/aug/21/guardianfirstbookaward1999.guardianfirstbookaward 21 Sarah Dillon, “Introducing David Mitchell’s Universe: A Twenty-First Century House of Fiction”. In David Mitchell: Critical Essays, (ed.) Sarah Dillon (Canterbury, Gylphi Limited, 2011), 6. 22 David Mitchell, interview by Kelly Frame, 25 May 2015, Sydney. 23 David Mitchell, “On Reappearing Characters”, 619. multi-perspective narratives diffused across space (and time). This narrative device of layered perspective is apparent in the most popular and critically-acclaimed television series in recent years, such as Mad Men, Game of Thrones, The Wire, Show Me a Hero, and The Walking Dead. Lana and Lilly Wachowski, who directed the film adaptation of Cloud Atlas, subsequently created the series Sense8, which similarly explores the connections between characters across cultures, languages and nations.24 There are clear thematic resonances between Sense8 and Mitchell’s fiction. These echoes underscore Mitchell’s participation in what is perceptible as a planetary movement emerging in the arts. His fiction is characterised not only by polyphony but also by clearly defined narrative structures. Mitchell has remarked of writing within an orderly narrative structure that:

The challenge lies [in] adapting what you do anyway. In a way, it was just like any other straitjacket that as a writer you put yourself in to then perform an act of escapology to get out of it again. The act of escapology is that of writing a book that works.25 This mindset is evident in the “palindromic” structure of Cloud Atlas, the chapter-per- decade structure of both The Bone Clocks and Slade House, and the cyclical structures of Ghostwritten, number9dream, and Black Swan Green.26 Mitchell is arguably a short story-teller masquerading as a novelist – indeed he has made the rather large claim that all novels are in essence “compounded short stories”.27 Each of his own novels comprises chapters that present discrete scenes, with lapses in time or shifts in perspective signalled in chapter divisions. Notable contemporary novels by other authors – including A Brief History of Seven Killings, A Visit from the Goon Squad, and The Luminaries – embody a structural configuration that has been associated with Mitchell.28 Whether Mitchell has spearheaded this particular turn in the evolution of the

24 Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski, J. Michael Straczynski (creators), Sense8, Netflix, June 5, 2015. The television series explores the lives of eight different characters from different parts of the globe. These characters are simultaneously arrested by a vision of the brutal murder of a woman. The characters discover that they are “sensates” – people who are telepathically and emotionally connected with each other. 25 Scott Timberg, “David Mitchell is over the genre wars: ‘Confining an entire genre as being unworthy of your attention is a bizarre act of self-harm’,” Salon, October 26, 2015, accessed August 23, 2016, http://www.salon.com/2015/10/26/david_mitchell_is_over_the_genre_wars_confining_an_entire_genre_a s_being_unworthy_of_your_attention_is_a_bizarre_act_of_self_harm/. 26 Sarah Dillon, “Introducing David Mitchell’s Universe: A Twenty-First Century House of Fiction,”10 27 Peter Childs and James Green, “The Novels in Nine Parts”. In David Mitchell: Critical Essays, (ed.) Sarah Dillon (Canterbury: Gylphi Limited, 2011), 25-47. 28 James Marlon, A Brief History of Seven Killings, (London: Oneworld Publications, 2015). Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad, (London: Hachette UK, 2011). Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries, (London: Granta, 2013). novel is difficult to determine. Notwithstanding, his work continues to exemplify this kind of narrative structure while engaging with a dominant theme in contemporary literature: that of environmentalism.

Mitchell was invited to discuss precisely this theme at The Sydney Writers Festival in 2015. His fellow-panellists were Emily St Mandel, the author of Station Eleven, John Bradbury (Clayde), and Jonathan Lethem (Chronic City). These authors expressed a shared concern with an encroaching environmental apocalypse. The prevalence of this theme transcends this one Australian event, the authors’ concerns reflecting an emerging trend in contemporary literature.29 David Mitchell’s novels are part of a burgeoning literature of climate change, with many fictional works now depicting this crisis of global proportions as a test of the moral fibre of contemporary society that will ultimately determine the fate of civilisation.

Mitchell’s fiction offers an invigorating insight into the dominant aesthetic trends, political concerns, and philosophical positions of contemporary literature. My aim in this thesis is to assess the demonstrable significance of Mitchell’s writing in both literary and political terms. The key question has two parts: How does Mitchell reconcile postmodern literary techniques with a vision of the planetary and, to the extent that he is successful in reconciling these, what philosophical or political statement is he striving to make? In order to answer this question, I focus in the first chapter on reviewing the extant scholarship on Mitchell’s work, and identifying the various schools of thought among his critics. I build on this review of the extant critical literature with a justification for considering Mitchell’s position within a postmodern framework. I then demonstrate how the postmodernist features and philosophy of his work cohere with the other principal defining feature of his fiction – the invocation of the planetary. The first chapter establishes a planetary postmodern framework and includes an account of “postmodernism” based on my review of major theorists, and a delineation of the literary techniques associated with postmodernism. I also consider the political potential of postmodernism and the ways in which a planetary ethos can be compatible with the postmodern tradition. This opening chapter concludes with a defence of the pertinence of a planetary framework (as distinct from theories of the Anthropocene or

29 This event took place at the Sydney Writers Festival on May 26, 2015. The preceding comments are derived from my having been in the audience at this event. cosmopolitanism), a corresponding definition of the planetary, and discussion of the ideas of planetary and environmental thinkers.

The first chapter thus establishes and defends the theoretical framework which informs the following chapters. By way of explanation, I want to map the philosophy of the “planetary postmodern” developed by Mitchell across all of his novels while acknowledging that each novel possesses a distinctive style, subject, and focus. Each of the remaining chapters is intended to answer the key research question in relation to a specific novel, one chapter being devoted to each novel with the exception of Slade House, which will be discussed in the concluding chapter of the thesis. The alternative – treating Mitchell’s oeuvre as a monolith – risks homogenising his works and implying that they are singularly-focused. The conclusions drawn about each novel are based predominantly on close textual analysis in an effort to avoid such a reductive approach, and I will refer to a range of philosophical sources which reflect Mitchell’s own multifaceted examination of the human condition.

In the discussion of Ghostwritten I consider how Mitchell engages with notions of Being, drawing upon both Heidegger’s Being and Time and Jonathan Boulter’s discussion of Heidegger and the posthuman in Mitchell’s novel. number9dream is, I contend, Mitchell’s most explicit exploration of identity in the age of simulacra. Accordingly, I will refer extensively to Baudrillard’s conceptualisation of hyperrealism. In relation to Cloud Atlas I engage with various accounts of utopianism in order to elucidate the novel’s intricate timeline. Black Swan Green returns to the question of identity in the postmodern era, although the novel is more optimistic about the individual’s quest for a coherent sense of self than is number9dream; thus my arguments are supported once again by reference to Heidegger but also to Rousseau. The chapter on The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet considers how Mitchell engages with questions of historicity and privilege. Finally, examining The Bone Clocks, I identify the ways in which Mitchell explores the concept of the uncanny in order to emphasise humanity’s repression of the environment as well as the other destructive aspects of civilisation. Although the theoretical approaches with which I engage extend beyond what is traditionally associated with the postmodern, they are consonant with Mitchell’s own depiction of the human condition, and how the nature of our existence is interrogated, threatened and even altered in an age in which grand narratives engender suspicion. The concluding chapter synthesises the preceding analyses and explains how each contributes to my central argument. Here I not only reflect upon the common overarching themes and philosophies that have been discerned in each novel but also discuss the ways in which Mitchell’s writing has developed over time and the likely future direction of his work.

David Mitchell’s fiction often appears dialectical insofar as he emphasises – without entirely resolving – the tensions between fate and chance, evolutionary imperatives and human agency, and notions of Being with the illusion of an essential self. In his own words:

I’m too much of a thesis and antithesis guy, I hear one argument and think ‘yeah’, and then I hear the other presented really persuasively and I think ‘well, actually, yeah…Isn’t truth very often both? [. . .] I feel I can’t call myself a political writer because I feel that I’m too vague about the rights and wrongs of things, and I’ve got no better option than the slow, fumbling progress towards kindness and less inefficiency. It’s messy, it’s a messy world, and I’m distrustful of demagogues that tell you otherwise. That’s my political zone.30 Mitchell is reticent in professing the political orientation and aspirations of his fiction but there are significant ramifications in his occupying this “political zone” – a zone which I argue is postmodern because narratives of truth are constantly and necessarily interrogated. The humanist ethos – the desire for “progress towards kindness” – that characterises his fiction ultimately supersedes the opposing ideas that his fiction considers. The value system of his novels emphasises the primacy of tolerance, kindness, and freedom. This thesis will culminate in an evaluation of the significance and potential limits of this “political zone” in relation to the urgent socio-political and environmental crises that propel the narratives of David Mitchell.

30 David Mitchell, interview by Kelly Frame, 25 May 2015, Sydney. Planetary Postmodernism and David Mitchell

“My, my, I ain’t seen rain like this since 1971. Must be the end of the world. I seen it coming on the telly.” – “Lao Tzu”31

I. Situating David Mitchell

Critical interest in the novels of David Mitchell has grown exponentially in recent years, resulting in vigorous discussion concerning the significance of this author. Two major works have been dedicated to Mitchell’s writing: A Temporary Future: The Fiction of David Mitchell by Patrick O’Donnell, and David Mitchell: Critical Essays, edited by Sarah Dillon. Complementing these ground-breaking works have been articles by numerous scholars, including those collected in a special edition of the journal SubStance. These texts grapple with the complexity and innovation of Mitchell’s novels, and indicate the tendency to situate Mitchell within a wider conversation about current trends in literature and literary theory. Works such as Fredric Jameson’s Antinomies of Realism, Berthold Schoene’s The Cosmopolitan Novel, and Richard Bradford’s The Novel Now make the case for Mitchell to be considered as a figurehead for an emergent subgenre of the novel, although there is continuing debate as to how that genre should be defined. In this chapter, I will examine the extant scholarship on Mitchell’s novels, and map the main lines of thought that emerge from this review. I will then seek to establish a theoretical framework (informed by the reviewed scholarship) upon which to base my analysis.

There is a broad range of subjects and critical approaches discernible in the scholarship devoted to David Mitchell’s work. Nevertheless, two concerns appear persistently to dominate the literature: namely, the extent to which Mitchell’s works can be considered as postmodern; and how his vision of the world is to be interpreted (if, indeed, he is offering a coherent and consistent vision of the world). The reconciliation of the postmodern elements and the global vision is the central “problematic” of Mitchell’s work, to use Jameson’s term. Sarah Dillon has articulated this in the introduction to David Mitchell: Critical Essays, acknowledging that “The question of whether Mitchell is writing postmodern fiction” is one that is persistent, and perhaps inescapable.32

31 David Mitchell, number9dream, (London: Sceptre, 2001), 18. The narrator of that novel, Eiji Miyake, nicknames an old man “Lao Tzu” because (Eiji believes) he resembles the Chinese philosopher 32 Sarah Dillon, “Introducing David Mitchell’s Universe: A Twenty-First Century House of Fiction”,18. Invariably, each of the scholars who will be discussed in this chapter either touches upon or directly addresses one or both of these issues. Consequently, there is an emerging dichotomy within the scholarship, with critics arguing either that Mitchell is a postmodern writer (Bradford, for example, includes Mitchell as one of the “New Postmodernists”), or that his work is a foundational oeuvre of an entirely new literary trend (typified by Schoene’s assertion that Mitchell’s novels are exemplary specimens of literary cosmopolitanism).33 In the following survey, I will first consider the postmodern argument and its defenders. There are competing definitions of the postmodern among these scholars (and in the second half of this chapter I will delineate my own criteria of the postmodern). For the purpose of this review, the postmodern can be generally associated with a certain aesthetic characterised by metafiction, fragmentation, and a refusal to affirm ‘meaning’ in narratives. Postmodernism is also defined by some critics in this review as pertaining to a certain era – be it the Cold War or that of late capitalism. After identifying the postmodern readings of Mitchell’s fiction, I will then discuss the work of those critics who argue that his work departs from postmodernism and represents an innovative cosmopolitan movement in fiction. I discuss definitions and features of cosmopolitanism in the second half of this chapter but, in general terms, literary cosmopolitanism refers to fictions that represent the world as constituted by different but interconnected peoples, spaces and cultures. Such texts are characterised by a commitment to global peace, justice and security. Finally, I will also engage with those critics who propose that Mitchell’s work is eclectic and manifests a number of perspectives (including both the postmodern and cosmopolitan) which are not mutually exclusive.

David Mitchell’s most successful novel – both critically and commercially – is Cloud Atlas, and the bulk of academic work published on his fiction has been devoted to this novel. Ghostwritten and number9dream are arguably the most postmodern of his oeuvre, however, and the categorisation of Mitchell by some scholars as a postmodern writer is largely informed by these works. The aesthetic style of number9dream corresponds with many of the features of postmodernism: Kathryn Simpson’s reading of that novel emphasises the significance of narrative structure in denying a sense of closure or the affirmation of meaning. She posits that the novel, while demonstrating all

33 Richard Bradford, The Novel Now, (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 47. Berthold Schoene, The Cosmopolitan Novel, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 98. the structural and thematic hallmarks of a traditional bildungsroman, manifests postmodern elements (including the inconclusive ending) that subvert the notion of stabilised identity. According to Simpson, this subversion is achieved by the protagonist’s (Eiji’s) compulsive escapism into fantasies which “[…] inform his perception and interpretation of the literal and metaphorical journey-quest he is undertaking”.34 Peter Childs and James Green essentially concur with Simpson’s analysis, observing that this novel “rejects the traditional closure of the Bildungsroman” and that the influence of various media on Eiji serves “[…] to undercut the notion of distinct, self-authored identity”.35 A number of critics, including Childs and Green, invoke Baudrillard’s postmodern notion of hyperrealism to describe the relation between media and self in Mitchell’s fiction (and particularly in number9dream): “Indeed, in the flow of signs and images beamed into Eiji’s consciousness, there is more than a hint of Baudrillard’s vision of a reality that has terminally dissolved into a depthless spectacle”.36 Baryon Posadas discusses hyperrealism in depth in his essay entitled “Remediations of ‘Japan’ in number9dream”. He associates the novel’s engagement with hyperrealism (as the product of global modernity) with questions of authority and legitimacy:

Mitchell’s novel deploys a dazzling barrage of disorienting images in order to represent its Tokyo setting as an image-saturated space wherein it is no longer possible to trace signs to their referents and any sense of a coherent meaning becomes impossible.37 Posadas argues that Mitchell’s novel functions as “an intertextual doppelganger” of Haruki Murakami’s Wind-up Bird Chronicle, with the central storyline – a quest for a father – evoking “metafictional questions of origin and authorship”.38 He concludes that “number9dream proclaims its allegiance to a conception of authorship as a function produced by the text, not as an origin of the text, or as an arbiter of its meaning”.39 This

34 Kathryn Simpson, “Coming of Age in number9dream”. In David Mitchell: Critical Essays, (ed.) Sarah Dillon (Canterbury: Gylphi Limited, 2011), 54. 35 Peter Childs and James Green, “The Novels in Nine Parts,” 38, 39. 36 Quotation from Peter Childs and James Green, Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels, (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 135. Celia Wallhead and Marie-Luise Kohlke discuss “Baudrillardian imagery” in Cloud Atlas. Celia Wallhead and Marie-Luise Kohlke, “The Neo-Victorian Frame of Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas: Temporal and Traumatic Reverberations”. In Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma:The Politics of Bearing After-Witness, (eds.) Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 247. 37 Baryon Posadas, “Remediations of ‘Japan’ in number9dream”. In David Mitchell: Critical Essays, (ed.) Sarah Dillon (Canterbury: Gylphi Limited, 2011), 82-83. 38 Ibid., 89. 39 Ibid., 90. argument clearly resonates with Roland Barthes’ postmodernist theory of the death of the author, and Posadas’ essay suggests that Mitchell (or at least this novel) is endorsing a postmodern reading of number9dream.

Postmodern readings of Cloud Atlas similarly focus upon metafiction and the complex structure of the novel. In the essay “Cloud Atlas and If on a winter’s night a traveller: Fragmentation and Integrity in the Postmodern Novel”, William McMorran eschews the task of defending a postmodern categorisation of Mitchell’s novels, stating that “it is enough to observe that both Calvino and Mitchell are popularly as well as critically identified with the postmodern or postmodernist label”.40 Mitchell credited Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night, which presents a series of succeeding stories without ever concluding them, with inspiring the structure of Cloud Atlas. The structure of Mitchell’s novel does satisfy the readers’ desire to read the end of each story; thus it effectively is like “holding a mirror up to Calvino’s novel”.41 Rose Harris-Birtill also identifies the comparable postmodern features of Calvino’s and Mitchell’s work, citing the narrative “false starts” that give the reader “an early lesson in distrusting the author”.42 Harris-Birtill’s analysis extends to other aspects of form, with particular reference to the complex structures and overt metafiction featured in Mitchell’s work. A number of other critics similarly appraise Mitchell’s employment of genre, narrative voice, and form as postmodern. Courtney Hopf focuses on the reader’s experience of Cloud Atlas, in which the first chapter is re-contextualised as a text read by the narrator of the second chapter (and so on). Hopf argues that these “false starts” produce a certain effect that requires constant readjustment by the reader:

The palimpsest that results problematizes the reading process and encourages additional blurring of subjectivity – as the reader progresses through the novel, she is placed in a new subject position as the character who is encountering each narrative, a process that is perpetually shifting and continually layering on top of itself.43

40 Will McMorran, “Cloud Atlas and If on a Winter’s Night A Traveller: Fragmentation and Integrity in the Postmodern Novel”. In David Mitchell: Critical Essays, (ed.) Sarah Dillon (Canterbury: Gylphi Limited, 2011), 158. 41 David Mitchell, “Q&A: Book World Talks with David Mitchell”, The Washington Post, (The Washington Post Company, August 22, 2004). 42 Rose Harris-Birtill, “‘A Row of Screaming Russian Dolls’: Escaping the Panopticon in Mitchell’s number9dream,” SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism 44, no. 1 (2015): 61. 43 Courtney Hopf, “The Stories We Tell: Discursive Identity through Narrative Form in Cloud Atlas”. In David Mitchell: Critical Essays, (ed.) Sarah Dillon (Canterbury: Gylphi Limited, 2011), 111. The postmodern distrust of metanarratives is thereby represented in the structural revelations that each story is a diegetic text within another narrative. Jo Alyson Parker considers the open-ended structure of Cloud Atlas as complicating any reading of the novel (an interpretation that corresponds with Kathryn Simpson’s reading of the conclusion of number9dream). Parker observes that “Mitchell plays with the way in which we depend upon conclusiveness for meaning, and he pushes the limits of how far we can sustain the open-ended”.44 Scott Dimovitz’s reading of Cloud Atlas emphasises the self-reflexive focus on language and orality, asserting that (in reference to Noam Chomsky’s theorisation of language as the combination of “deep” and “surface” structures):

The mouth purports to channel one’s thoughts from the “deep structure,” yet this early Chomskyan formulation gradually gives way to a more postmodern performative model of identity, in which language, ideology, and culture speak through the subject, ghostwriting them from a force that is both within and outside of the self.45 Related to these issues of form, structure, metafiction and questions of authorship are the workings of time and narratives of history in Mitchell’s fiction. Heather J. Hicks’ reading of Cloud Atlas focusses upon how the novel’s structure conveys notions of time. She defines the novel as a work of “postmodern apocalyptic fiction” that simultaneously challenges cyclical and linear conceptions of time through the “boomerang arc of the novel”.46 Hicks identifies the chapter entitled “An Orison of Sonmi-451” as being “committed to exploring the tension between a cyclical understanding of the world, with its fabricated, archetypal identities, and an action- driven, linear narrative that reframes Sonmi-451 as an historical subject”.47 This dichotomy of temporalities presents what Hicks concludes is the novel’s fundamentally anti-historicist, and therefore postmodern, ethos. William Stephenson also considers temporality in Cloud Atlas, arguing that “Mitchell’s work refuses to allow its SF

44 Jo Alyson Parker, “David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas of Narrative Constraints and Environmental Limits”. In Time: Limits and Constraints, (eds.) Jo Alyson Parker, Paul Harris and Christian Steineck (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 205. 45 Scott Dimovitz, “‘The Sound of Silence’: Eschatology and the Limits of the Word in Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas,” SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism 44, no. 1 (2015): 75. 46 Heather J Hicks, “‘This Time Round’: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and the Apocalyptic Problem of Historicism,” Postmodern Culture 20, no. 3 (2010), 1, doi: 10.1353/pmc.2010.0012. 47 Ibid., 6. [science fiction] sections to establish a dominant view of the future”.48 Stephenson’s analysis reinforces Hick’s anti-historicist reading, suggesting that whether a milieu is utopian or dystopian “is a matter of perception”; hence Sonmi-451’s dual existence in the novel as both slave and goddess.49 Jonathon Boulter’s reading of Mitchell’s first three novels suggests a sustained concern with the inaccessibility of personal pasts and narratives of collective history. Boulter argues that “Mitchell’s various texts fetishize the image and the idea of the human dispossessed of and by history”.50 Casey Shoop, Dermot Ryan, Celia Wallhead and Marie-Luise Kohlke all variously argue that Mitchell’s work can be considered as “historiographic metafiction”, drawing upon Linda Hutcheon’s theory of postmodern fiction. Shoop and Ryan assert that Cloud Atlas belongs to this genre “[…] in which narrative techniques self-consciously emphasize their own conventions and textual indeterminacies in order to expose the aporias in historical representation itself”.51 Fredric Jameson in turn identifies Cloud Atlas as a work of historiographic metafiction, in which “historical periods [are] grasped as styles”.52 The construction of the novel as a series of pastiches reflects the postmodern condition wherein individual, original style is no longer achievable. The vision of history produced in Cloud Atlas is not a grand narrative of events or ideas; rather, as Jameson observes, “each segment, each story, is indeed registered by a different material apparatus of transmission, so that to that extent Cloud Atlas offers a kind of experimental history, not so much of styles and events, as rather of communicational technology”.53 The narratives are therefore connected through their common concern with the transmission of stories. The randomisation implicit in this mode of connection evinces the postmodern resistance to grand narratives of history. The novel undercuts homogenous accounts of human history and futurity by parading the tenuousness of its own organisation.

Jameson cites the palindromic structure of Cloud Atlas as an effective means of analysing and critiquing historiography and the predicted future of late capitalism. In his assessment, the contemporary, postmodern historical novel must account for the late

48 William Stephenson, “SF, Present Future and Cognitive Mapping”. In David Mitchell: Critical Essays, (ed.) Sarah Dillon (Canterbury: Gylphi Limited, 2011), 232. 49 Ibid., 234. 50 Jonathan Boulter, Melancholy and the Archive, (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 102. 51 Casey Shoop and Dermot Ryan, “‘Gravid with the Ancient Future’: Cloud Atlas and the Politics of Big History,” SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism 44, no. 1 (2015), 104. 52 Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism, (London: Verso, 2013), 307. 53 Ibid., 309. capitalist condition of “getting so far ahead of ourselves that only our imaginary futures are adequate to do justice to our present, whose once buried pasts have all vanished into our presentism”.54 Lynda Ng, Louise Economides, Shawn Ballard, and Peter Vermeulen also assert that David Mitchell’s novels represent life in the world of late capitalism.55 Ng observes that “In Mitchell’s world, one form of imperialism is merely replaced by another, prompting us to reflect on the global system of totalized capitalism which promotes rampant consumption and valorizes individual appetite at the expense of lasting social bonds”.56 Jameson expounds upon a secondary symptom of the experience of life under late capitalism (one which I will discuss in greater depth later in this chapter) – the crisis of cognitive mapping. The struggle to map space cognitively in Mitchell’s novels has been discussed by Phillip E. Wegner, Scott Selisker, and Marco de Waard, respectively.57

The representation of space is the facet of Mitchell’s fiction which has aroused the most critical contention. Berthold Schoene argues that Mitchell’s work exemplifies a new cosmopolitan fiction that imagines

[…] globality by depicting worldwide human living in multifaceted, delicately entwined, serialised snapshots of the human condition, marked by global connectivity and virtual proximity as much as psycho-geographical detachment and xenophobic segregation.58 He interprets the palimpsest structure of Cloud Atlas as being “opposed to postmodern fragmentation” and suggests that “this compositeness is designed to preserve the

54 Ibid., 313. 55 Lynda Ng, “Cannibalism, Colonialism and Apocalypse in Mitchell’s Global Future,” SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism 44, no. 1 (2015), 107-122. Louise Economides, “Recycled Creatures and Rogue Genomes: Biotechnology in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas,” Literature Compass 6, no. 3, (2009), 615-631. Shawn Ballard, “Complex Systems and Global Catastrophe: Networks in David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten,” New Directions in Ecocriticism, (2010), accessed March 27, 2015 https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/25241. Pieter Vermeulen, “David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten and the ‘Novel of Globalization’: Biopower and the Secret History of the Novel”, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 53, no. 4, (2012), 381-392. 56 Lynda Ng, “Cannibalism, Colonialism and Apocalypse in Mitchell’s Global Future”, SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism 44, no. 1 (2015), 118. 57 Phillip E. Wegner, “The Possibilities of the Novel: A Look Back on the James-Wells Debate,” The Henry James Review 36, no. 3 (2015), 267-279. Scott Selisker, “The Cult and the World System: The Topoi of David Mitchell’s Global Novels”, Novel: A Forum on Fiction 47, no. 3 (2014), 443-459. Marco de Waard, “Dutch Decline Redux: Remembering New Amsterdam in the Global and Cosmopolitan Novel”. Marco de Waard (ed.), Imagining Global Amsterdam, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 101 – 122. 58 Berthold Schoene, The Cosmopolitan Novel, 98. singularity of each segment as an integral building block”.59 Paul Harris identifies Ghostwritten, Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks as cosmopolitan novels, an assessment that resonates with the analysis of Claire Larsonneur (who describes Mitchell as a “global writer”) and, to a lesser extent, that of Rita Barnard.60 Childs and Green concur with Schoene’s position and reject the postmodern classification of Mitchell’s work on the grounds that the palimpsest structure of Mitchell’s first three novels “parallels a wider aesthetic and cultural condition”.61 Childs’ and Green’s definition of postmodernism is periodised – they regard it as a phenomenon of the Cold War Era. It is noteworthy that, despite this, their analysis of Mitchell’s fiction draws upon postmodern sources such as Baudrillard and favourably cites Kathryn Simpson’s essay on number9dream as a postmodern text. However, Schoene’s designation of Mitchell’s novels as cosmopolitan fiction has also come under challenge. Fiona McCulloch warns that:

[…] one must resist regarding Mitchell’s spatio-temporal interweaving simply as celebratory cosmopolitanism. Rather, he is presenting a compressed vision that correlates more closely to Braidotti’s critique of phallocentric capitalism.62 She cautions that an optimistic, cosmopolitan reading of Mitchell’s fiction might obscure the postmodern settings and crises that permeate his narratives. Helene Machinal argues that the structure of Cloud Atlas negates a global vision as the novel’s structural “fragmentation can be envisaged as a means of asserting the illusory belief in ‘grand narratives’ as theorized by Lyotard”.63

Conversely, Lynda Ng and Rita Barnard are critical of what they consider to be the cosmopolitan aspirations of Mitchell’s fiction. Barnard, who in general considers Mitchell a cosmopolitan writer, cites examples of cliché in the characterisation of certain cultural actors: “It is at such moments, when we seem to fall back on national stereotype, that [Cloud Atlas’s] claims to a global or cosmopolitan sensibility seem to

59 Ibid., 98. 60 Claire Larsonneur, “Revisiting Dejima (Japan): From Recollections to Fiction in David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010),” SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism 44, no. 1 (2015), 146. Rita Barnard, “Fictions of the Global,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 42, no. 2 (2009), 207-215. 61 Peter Childs and James Green, “The Novels in Nine Parts,” 44. 62 Fiona McCulloch, Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary British Fiction: Imagined Identities, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 147. 63 Helene Machinal, “Cloud Atlas: From Postmodernity to the Posthuman”. In David Mitchell: Critical Essays, (ed.) Sarah Dillon (Canterbury: Gylphi Limited, 2011), 137. be at their weakest”.64 Lynda Ng has critiqued Mitchell’s novels as manifesting a totalising, Eurocentric bias. She cites the depiction of corporatism in the palimpsests of Cloud Atlas as “an argument for the universal totality of capitalism”, asserting that the novel “therefore falls more in line with discourses of globalisation rather than notions of the planetarity”.65 Ng’s argument is overtly politicised, as she accuses Mitchell of engaging in “a totalising version of history written by the oppressors” – namely, the West.66 In the chapter devoted to The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, I will argue that Mitchell examines the power of History (with a capital ‘H’) to exclude minority voices, and that several of his narratives (the “Holy Mountain” chapter of Ghostwritten, for example) are exercises in reinstating or recasting the histories of the subjugated ‘Other’. Nicholas Dunlop has argued along similar lines that Mitchell’s fiction

[…] characteristically moves beyond the narrow historical moment of European imperialism to encompass the contemporary sense of climactic and repressed guilt concerning globalized capitalism and its exploitation of geographic and cultural specificity in an age that is putatively ‘post’-colonial.67 Ng’s argument (that Mitchell’s fiction is orientalist) is one I consider in more detail in the thesis, but what can be determined from her dissertation and Dunlop’s essay is that Mitchell is depicting global networks and interconnections that are exploitative as well as altruistic.

The arguments in favour of either a postmodern or cosmopolitan classification of Mitchell’s writings hinge upon specific definitions of each theory. Rather than attempt to read Mitchell within the confines of one framework, several critics have taken a more variegated approach. A reading of Mitchell’s fiction through a theoretically “hybridized” lens enables the critic to bring a range of philosophical frameworks to bear upon the novels. While Patrick O’Donnell acknowledges “[…] that Mitchell has been deeply influenced by “classic” postmodernism, at least in terms of some elements of form and technique”, he refers intermittently to postmodernism, cosmopolitanism, the planetary, psychogeography, and metamodernism in his discussion of Mitchell’s

64 Rita Barnard, “Fictions of the Global”, 213. 65 Lynda Ng, “Genre and the Nation in Contemporary: Remapping the Landscape after Globalisation,” (PhD Thesis, UNSW, 2011), 276, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/fapi/datastream/unsworks:9756/SOURCE02?view=true. 66 Ibid., 277. 67 Nicholas Dunlop, “Speculative Fiction as Postcolonial Critique in Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas”. In David Mitchell: Critical Essays, (ed.) Sarah Dillon (Canterbury: Gylphi Limited, 2011), 211. work.68 In The Novel Now, Richard Bradford identifies Mitchell alongside such writers as Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, and Julian Barnes as influential figures of the British movement that Bradford delineates as “the New Postmodernists”.69 He argues that the work of these writers, whilst exhibiting characteristics of postmodernism, is made distinctive through the blending of realism and the surreal. In Bradford’s analysis, “the repertoire of imposture appears limitless and unclassifiable, except that what all of these works have in common is their abandonment of any obligation to explain or justify their excursions from credulity and mimesis”.70 The achievement of the New Postmodernists, he suggests, is the rejection of postmodern academic jargon and the renewed commercial interest in this kind of “hybridized”, realist/postmodern fiction.71 James Wood (less concerned, in this case, with the “spirit of the novel”) similarly identifies the problem with definitions of postmodernism that emphasise meaninglessness, proposing that

we might settle for “late postmodernism”, a term that suggests the peculiar statelessness of contemporary fiction, which finds itself wandering – not unhappily – between tradition and novelty, realism and anti-realism, the mass audience and the elitist critic.72 Stephen J. Burn, Marco de Waard, Oliver Lindner, and Scott Selisker have variously argued that Mitchell’s fiction extends beyond what can be encompassed simply under the term “postmodern”. Selisker notes that Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas exemplify “formal and thematic shifts from the Cold War global novel of conspiracy to the post- Cold War novel that maps a different kind of global complexity”.73 Lindner does not consider postmodernism to be antipathetic to cosmopolitanism (albeit otherwise agreeing with Schoene’s definition of the emerging genre), stating that “[…] while incorporating several defining features of postmodern writing, it can be argued that Cloud Atlas also transcends these generic conventions”.74 Certainly, Schoene’s framework for describing cosmopolitan fiction offers a persuasive account of the phenomena of interconnectivity in the contemporary world, yet the notion that

68 Patrick O’Donnell, A Temporary Future: The Fiction of David Mitchell, 5. 69 Richard Bradford, The Novel Now, 47. 70 Ibid., 65-66. 71 Ibid., 78. 72 James Wood, “The Floating Library”, New Yorker, July 5, 2010, 7, accessed March 31, 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/07/05/the-floating-library. 73 Scott Selisker, “The Cult and the World System: The Topoi of David Mitchell’s Global Novels,” 444. 74 Oliver Lindner, “Postmodernism and Dystopia: David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (2004)”. Eckart Voigts and Alessandra Boller (eds.), Dystopia, Science Fiction, Post-Apocalypse Classics – New Tendencies – Model Interpretations, (Postfach: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2015), 367. Mitchell’s fiction is encompassed entirely within this anthropocentric, anti-postmodern framework is potentially problematic. As McCulloch observes, Mitchell’s fiction ought not be restricted to the classification of “cosmopolitan novels” because his work “[…] reaches beyond cosmopolitan human empathy to incorporate zoe, including fabricants and planet Earth”.75

Dillon observes in the introduction to David Mitchell: Critical Essays that

[…] the consensus seems to be that while Mitchell employs postmodern literary techniques, he does not adhere to the apolitical and anti-social nihilism of postmodernity with its ironic take on modern life and its paradoxical insistence on the inadequateness of narrative, language and literature.76 While Dillon notes that Mitchell’s work is characterised by the technical accoutrements generally associated with postmodernism, she argues that the overall tone and philosophical outlook of the novels are not consistent with those of postmodernism: “While Mitchell might repeatedly indulge the self-referentiality characteristic of postmodern fiction, this self-referentiality is in fact always about the fertility, power and sustenance of fiction, not its exhaustion”.77 Maria Beville supports this position, citing the “sincerity” of Mitchell’s works, yet nevertheless conceding that the “ruptures” in Cloud Atlas are postmodern.78 The seeming tension between the postmodern style and the coherence of Mitchell’s novels is created by the dual foci of his fiction – the individual and the multiverse. A comment by Gore Vidal concerning Italo Calvino’s writing is thus just as pertinent a description of Mitchell’s fiction: “he vacillates between macro and micro. The whole and the part”.79 Vidal recognises the dangers of treating Calvino’s work reductively; it cannot, he suggests, be treated as a series of discrete vignettes; nor can each part be considered merely as the building blocks of a universal “message”. It is this notion of vacillation which similarly distinguishes Mitchell’s work. Thus a thorough analysis of Mitchell’s work must encompass its vacillation between postmodern aspects and planetary vision. I argue in this thesis that the humanist ethos of Mitchell’s work does not need to be perceived as outside of, or in

75 Fiona McCulloch, Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary British Fiction: Imagined Identities, 151. 76 Sarah Dillon, “Introducing David Mitchell’s Universe: A Twenty-First Century House of Fiction,” 18. 77 Ibid. 78 Maria Beville, “Getting Past the‘Post–’: History and Time in the Fiction of David Mitchell”, [sic] – a Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation, (2013), 4, 13. 79 Gore Vidal, “Calvino’s Death”, in United States: Essays 1952-1992, (London: Andre Deutsch, 1993), 499. opposition to, postmodernism. Rather, it is more productive to consider how Mitchell’s work develops out of and extends postmodern techniques and critiques. Therefore, my approach will resemble that of critics such as O’Donnell and Bradford, who propose a reconciliation of Mitchell’s postmodern techniques with his global vision.

II. Postmodernism and the “New Political Art”

The diversity of David Mitchell’s linguistic styles and subjects evidently poses a challenge to critics who seek to situate his novels within a particular literary movement. The epithet “experimentalist” has been associated with Mitchell on more than one occasion, and the question must be asked whether Mitchell’s daring literary innovation is indicative of the broader development and direction of contemporary literature.80 Whatever direction this may be, Mitchell’s novels do not represent a schism within, or a departure from, literary traditions. His reworking of traditional literary forms and genres, as well as his myriad intertextual allusions, invite a consideration of his fiction as being in dialogue with, rather than rejecting, literary traditions and techniques.

The critique of postmodern theory which has been expressed by scholars of Mitchell has validity. Postmodernism is a notoriously ephemeral, self-contradicting set of theories and practices, the very precepts of which are rigorously debated upon, even by the key theorists of the movement. Sarah Dillon has observed that postmodernism is characterised by an “apolitical…anti-social nihilism” and propounds the “inadequateness of narrative, language and literature”.81 If this nihilistic and apathetic philosophy is at the core of postmodernism, it would indeed be incongruent with the celebration of storytelling itself and the humanitarian ethos that pervade Mitchell’s work. The following discussion, however, will put the case that postmodernism need not necessarily be antipathetic to the social or the political, nor dismissive of narrative, language and literature entirely, but that postmodernism merely recognises the limitations and conditions of these phenomena.

The exegesis offered here is tailored to an analysis of David Mitchell’s fiction, yet still considers the major works of philosophers of the postmodern, with particular emphasis on Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jean- Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, and Linda

80 Wyatt Mason, “David Mitchell, the Experimentalist”. 81 Sarah Dillon, “Introducing David Mitchell’s Universe: A Twenty-First Century House of Fiction”, 18. Hutcheon’s three major works on this subject. I will consider postmodernism as a periodised phenomenon arising from specific socio-economic and historic conditions, and as a range of characteristics, both aesthetic and philosophic. The former conception of postmodernism threatens to compartmentalise the movement as a fad of either the Cold War or the 1980s. Childs and Green periodise postmodernism “against a backdrop of Cold War relations”, and accordingly they consider the construct to be “increasingly unsatisfactory to describe the flows of mediated identity, the global reach of capital, the possibilities of new political paradigms, and the modulating networks of the world market”.82 The following review of postmodern scholarship will offer a counter- argument to this position.

Lyotard represents postmodernism as the cultural counterpart to the “postindustrial age”, which he suggests follows the 1950s.83 Lyotard asserts a fundamental principle: “I define postmodernism as incredulity to metanarratives”.84 The nature of knowledge has been transformed by technical innovations signifying a post-industrial age, a consequence of this transformation being that “the grand narrative has lost its credibility”.85 Lyotard argues that knowledge is no longer legitimated through reference to totalizing narratives of religion, science, or politics, but rather that truth is provisional and local. Postmodern art thus “puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable […]”.86 Lyotard alludes to certain aesthetic values and techniques associated with postmodernism, such as the pastiche or parody of traditional forms and genres, the challenge to a hegemonic ordering of literary forms, and the repudiation of a modernist nostalgia for grand narratives. Jean Baudrillard’s account of postmodernism, or the “era of simulacra and simulation”, similarly takes into account the loss of grand narratives as a basis for legitimation.87 Communication in the modern age is predominantly carried by electronic media, and Baudrillard postulates that contemporary Western society now operates on an image basis. The immersion of global citizens in a virtual world results in the

82 Peter Childs and James Green, “The Novels in Nine Parts”, 26. 83 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 3. 84 Ibid., xxiv. 85 Ibid., 37. 86 Ibid., 81. 87 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 2. “liquidation of all referentials” and therefore there can be no “real”, only the “hyperreal”.88 That is to say, people respond to images in their own right, not as reflections or signs of an empirical reality. An example from Mitchell’s fiction can be found when Eiji plays a video game entitled “Virtua Sapiens”, literally “virtual humans”, which simulates the character of his unknown father.89 Eiji interacts sincerely with this virtual parent, yet (as the reader learns) the avatar bears no resemblance or relation to the original. The virtual father would be considered by Baudrillard to be a “pure simulacrum”, or the final phase of the image.90 There are four developmental phases of the image, according to Baudrillard: sequentially it is “the reflection of a profound reality”; “it masks and denatures a profound reality”; “it masks the absence of a profound reality”; and, finally, “it has no relation to any reality whatsoever”, thus being a “pure simulacrum”.91 Eiji’s behaviour exemplifies the postmodern condition by his engagement solely with the virtual (or the simulacrum) because the real is not discernible. Furthermore, postmodernism’s denial of metanarratives enforces the acceptance (without nostalgia) of the notion that all images are “simulacra”.

Fredric Jameson’s Marxist critique of what he describes as a “cultural dominant” nevertheless conceives of postmodernism as the cultural condition of late capitalism. Jameson contends that Lyotard’s suggestion of a contemporary, “postindustrial age” misrepresents the development of capital. Jameson’s definition of postmodernism is contingent upon his depiction of “late capitalism”, a term he uses interchangeably with “‘multinational capitalism,’ ‘spectacle or image society,’ ‘media capitalism,’ ‘the world system,’ even ‘postmodernism’ itself”.92 Jameson’s account of the cultural climate draws upon Ernest Mandel’s Late Capitalism, which identifies in turn three stages in capitalism: “market capitalism, the monopoly stage or the stage of imperialism, and our own – wrongly called postindustrial, but what might be better termed multinational capital”.93 Late capitalism, Jameson argues, is a continuation of, yet distinct from, monopoly capitalism because of “the emergence of new forms of business organization (multinationals, transnationals) beyond the monopoly stage but, above all, the vision of a world capitalist system fundamentally distinct from the older imperialism, which was

88 Ibid., 2. 89 David Mitchell, number9dream, (London: Sceptre, 2001), 126. 90 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 6. 91 Ibid. 92 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or the Logic of Late Capitalism, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), xviii. 93 Ibid., 78. little more than a rivalry between the various colonial powers”.94 Jameson delineates the features of late capitalism thus:

Besides the forms of transnational business mentioned above, its features include the new international division of labor, a vertiginous new dynamic in international banking and the stock exchanges (including the enormous Second and Third World debt), new forms of media interrelationship (very much including transportation systems such as containerization), computers and automation, the flight of production to advanced Third World areas, along with all the more familiar social consequences, including the crisis of traditional labor, the emergence of yuppies, and gentrification on a now-global scale.95 Jameson eschews the task of directly defining postmodernism or offering “any conveniently coherent thumbnail meaning” as “the concept is not merely contested, [but] it is also internally conflicted and contradictory”.96 He does, however, identify certain characteristics of postmodernism that distinguish the “cultural dominant” from Modernism: a challenge to hegemony in art; a simultaneous indulgence in, and desensitisation from, excess and explicitness; “depthlessness” or the supremacy of simulacra; pastiche; the subversion of historicity and temporality; the destabilisation of the centred subject; the fragmentation of structure in artistic forms; the “waning of affect”; and “the deep constitutive relationships of all this to a whole new technology, which is itself a figure for a whole new economic world system” .97 No longer confined to the local, contemporary life is characterised by a ceaseless onslaught of marketing and media that situates the individual within a global space. Jameson notes that this causes a dilemma of self-orientation, or “the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentred communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects”.98 Jameson explores this dilemma through the concept of “cognitive mapping”, for which he draws from Kevin Lynch’s study, The Image of the City. Lynch identifies the practical importance of familiarity with one’s own environment in order to avoid disorientation. Familiarity with a space as expansive as a cityscape requires the individual to produce an “environmental image” that derives from “immediate sensation” and “the memory of past experience”.99

94 Ibid., xviii-xix. 95 Ibid., xix. 96 Ibid., xxii. 97 Ibid., 61, 58. 98 Ibid., 84. 99 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1960), 4. Jameson argues that the individual is no longer situated in the mere city-space, but has now been integrated into a global network. Furthermore, he suggests that the individual strives not merely for familiarity with geographical environs, but also for contextualisation in the social sphere. Consequently, a sense of self derives in part from our ability to “cognitively map our individual social relationship to local, national and international class realities”.100 In a postmodern or late capitalist context characterised by information and image overload, cognitive mapping is nigh impossible – the global system is too complex to represent, or to map. As a result, the individual’s notion of self is destabilised. It is this decentring of the subject – the inability of the individual to “map” or contextualise the self – that determines the nature of postmodern art, or what Jameson terms “the aesthetic of cognitive mapping”.101 Citing the precedent of poststructuralism, he argues against the possibility of a hermeneutical reading of postmodern art, in which “depth is replaced by surface, or by multiple surfaces (what is often called intertextuality is in that sense no longer a matter of depth)”.102

Art cannot be an expression of the interiority of a subject insofar as “the very concept of expression presupposes indeed some separation within the subject”.103 The idea that “the ‘death’ of the subject itself” equates to “the end of the autonomous bourgeois monad or ego or individual” has aesthetic consequences that extend beyond what Jameson refers to as “depthlessness”.104 The end of individuality and subjectivity thus signifies “the end of much more – the end for example of style, in the sense of the unique and the personal, the end of the distinctive individual brushstroke (as symbolised by the emergent primacy of mechanical reproduction […])”.105 According to Jameson, the “sense of the unique and personal” that typified high-modernism is no longer possible in postmodern culture. Postmodern art, therefore, appropriates forms and styles from the past - “modernist styles thereby become postmodernist codes”.106 This appropriation manifests in different ways, but perhaps most distinctly through intertextuality and pastiche. Jameson’s characterisation of postmodern intertextuality is that of a palimpsest of surfaces emulative of the barrage of images in late capitalist society. He defines pastiche (in contradistinction to parody) as

100 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or the Logic of Late Capitalism, 91. 101 Ibid., 89. Emphasis in original. 102 Ibid., 62. 103 Ibid., 61. 104 Ibid., 63. 105 Ibid., 64. 106 Ibid., 65. a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists.107 Pastiche and depthlessness reflect “a whole historically original consumers’ appetite for a world transformed into sheer images of itself and for pseudo-events and ‘spectacles’”.108 Just as the individual cannot locate herself in space, nor can she locate herself in history: “in faithful conformity to poststructuralist linguistic theory, the past as ‘referent’ finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts”.109 Jameson’s “surfaces” or “texts”, in this instance, operate analogously to Baudrillard’s “simulacra”. There is no longer a relation to reality; nor do texts or images signify anything other than their own artifice.

In contrast to Childs’ and Green’s assessment of postmodernism as “apolitical”, Jameson asserts that “every position on postmodernism in culture – whether apologia or stigmatization – is also at one and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today”.110 Postmodernism’s dialectical, even self-contradictory nature derives from the incapacity of the human mind to represent the global-network of capital and culture. He hypothesises, however, that postmodernism could develop into a politically salient aesthetic:

The new political art – if it is indeed possible at all – will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is, to say, to its fundamental object – the world space of multinational capital – at the same time at which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion.111 Linda Hutcheon has argued that “postmodernism is fundamentally contradictory, resolutely historical, and inescapably political”.112 Notably, whereas Hutcheon critiques Jameson’s Marxist perspective as “inimical to postmodernism”, she does not reject his

107 Ibid., 65. 108 Ibid., 66. 109 Ibid., 66. 110 Ibid., 55. 111 Ibid., 92. 112 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, (London: Routledge, 1988), 4. association of postmodernism with late capitalism.113 Instead, she cautions against over- generalising the historical and cultural basis for postmodernism. Hutcheon’s appraisal challenges the characterisation of postmodernism as nihilistic. She observes that the subversion of metanarratives does not imply an end to all truth, but instead offers a necessary critique of totalising truths. The phenomenon of postmodernism, then, is “one that uses and abuses, installs and then subverts, the very concepts it challenges”.114 Thus parody, Hutcheon argues, is the perfect postmodern form.115 Hutcheon considers modern parody to have evolved from a method of simple mockery. Contemporary parody contrasts generic literary forms and genres, as well as identifiable texts, but “does not always permit one of the texts to fare any better or worse than the other”.116 In contrast to Jameson’s “depthless pastiche”, Hutcheon’s version of parody is politically potent. It adopts, or “installs” a form, genre or text in order to critique it. Parody inherently juxtaposes two texts, and “a critical distance [is] implied between the backgrounded text being parodied and the new incorporating work, a distance usually signalled by irony”.117 One result of parody is the articulation of the artifice underlying every form and narrative. This self-reflexive, or metafictional, concern with narratives follows from Lyotard’s argument that all metanarratives are contrived systems designed to project meaning onto human experience. Thus Hutcheon makes the claim that “postmodernist contradictory art still installs that order, but it then uses it to demystify our everyday processes of structuring chaos, of imparting or assigning meaning”.118 The notion of an official history is one such metanarrative. Like Jameson, Hutcheon observes the inaccessibility of the past as a fundamental condition of postmodernism. “Historiographic metafiction”, or the postmodern historical novel, thus becomes a key postmodern form. Hutcheon argues that “its theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs (historiographic metafiction) is made the grounds for its rethinking and reworking of the forms and contents of the past”.119 The postmodern palimpsest of different hegemonic literary and cultural forms and genres (as described by Jameson) is thus considered by Hutcheon as a critical reflection on the artifice of

113 Ibid., 3. 114 Ibid., 3. 115 Her definition of parody differs from that of Jameson, who considers parody to be a satiric form designed to humiliate its object. 116 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms, (New York: Methuen, 1985), 31. 117 Ibid., 32. 118 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, 7. 119 Ibid., 5. Emphasis in original. metanarratives. She similarly notes the loss of modernist, individual style in art and literature that necessarily accompanies postmodernism, yet she considers this loss to be “a liberating challenge to a definition of subjectivity and creativity”. 120

Hutcheon’s assertion that postmodernism is a political aesthetic derives from the privileging of questioning in postmodern texts and forms. She identifies postmodernism as the philosophical descendant of 1960s protest culture, in which change ensued from the questioning of dominant social and political values. The postmodern dismissal of metanarratives ensures that all socio-economic and political systems are, indeed ought to be, subject to scrutiny. Hutcheon notes that postmodern criticism “is criticism which would include in its own discourse an implicit (or explicit) reflection upon itself”.121 This spirit of scrutiny inspires postmodernism to test limits: “limits of language, of subjectivity, of sexual identity, and we might also add: of systemization and uniformization”.122 By appropriation – namely via parody – postmodernism promotes a critical engagement with the world, for no governing narratives or systems can exercise undue authority as truth is local and provisional. Postmodernism does not, therefore, question merely political or social systems, but also the existential “implications of both our making and our making sense of our culture”.123

The postmodern framework that emerges from this review is apposite to a critical engagement with the works of David Mitchell. Intertextuality, pastiche, parody, the juxtaposition of “high” and “low” literary forms, the “schizophrenic” structuring, the polyphony of narrative voices, metafiction and experimentation with language – all these postmodern literary techniques are characteristic of his writing. There are strong grounds, subsequently, to defend a technical analysis of Mitchell’s work as postmodern. If postmodernism is best understood within the context, and as a development, of modernism. Mitchell’s work, I contend, is best understood as arising from postmodern literary aesthetics. Mitchell’s significance resides in how he has created innovative fiction that captures a contemporary, indeed planetary, zeitgeist from the foundations of the postmodern tradition. In this sense, I concur with those critics who assert that Mitchell should not be categorised exclusively as a postmodernist author. However, a

120 Ibid., 11. 121 Ibid., 13. 122 Ibid., 8. 123 Ibid., 21. Emphasis in original sustained analysis of Mitchell’s work that does not account for the influence of postmodernism would be, in my judgement, insufficient.

III. The Planetary, the Anthropocene, and the Cosmopolitan

It is this notion of the “planetary”, therefore, that must be established and reconciled with the postmodern elements in Mitchell’s work. The rationale behind this terminology is to differentiate my analysis from theories of the Anthropocene and Cosmopolitanism. These modes of thought effectively approach the one metaphor – the web of life – through different avenues, and offer different and illuminating ways through which to apprehend Mitchell’s fiction. In the following discussion I defend the decision to privilege the concept of the planetary, yet I will continue to refer to ideas generated within the rhetoric of Cosmopolitanism and the Anthropocene insofar as they coincide with (rather than oppose) planetary discourse.

The emerging concept of the ‘Anthropocene era’ has been accompanied by compelling and rigorous debate amongst critics from various disciplines. The Working Group on the Anthropocene recently petitioned the International Geological Congress for formal recognition of this new epoch as succeeding the Holocene era.124 The term “Anthropocene” has been described as “[referring] to a period in which human activities have a visible and tangible geological impact”.125 Scholars are divided over the designation of the Anthropocene, however, as it simultaneously offers the potential to galvanise political response to climate change on account of multi-disciplinary interest and carries problematic semantic associations. Scott Gilbert has contended that “[…] what we are calling the Anthropocene is a short geological event rather than an epoch”.126 Elaborating, he asserts that “The Anthropocene is, you know, ‘The Great Dying’, which is not an epoch, it is a transition time”.127 Jason Moore posited the notion of the Capitalocene in an effort to introduce the dynamics of power and capital into the discussion of the Anthropocene. Moore objects to the generalisation of “humanity as a ‘collective’ actor” within Anthropocene thought which “[assigns]

124 Joseph Dussault, “Welcome to the new age: Has the Anthropocene epoch begun?” The Christian Science Monitor (Boston, Mass), 30 Aug 2016. 125 Keijiro Suga, “Response to Karen Tei Yamashita’s Keynote Address – ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene’,” Leviathan 18, no.1, (2016), 78. 126 Cited in Donna Haraway et al, “Anthropologists are Talking – About the Anthropocene,” Ethnos 81, no. 3 (2015), 540-541. 127 Ibid., 541. responsibility for global change to humanity as a whole, rather than to the forces of capital and empire that have given modern world history its coherence”.128 Slavoj Žižek poses a similar critique of the Anthropocene argument, asserting that “anthropogenic climate change is only a ‘pseudo-problem’ masking the deeper question of international capitalism”.129 Objecting to the concept of the Anthropocene, Haraway, Moore and Gilbert emphasise the problems of framing climate change as something created and experienced solely by humans. They reject the underlying premise that people and nature are separate forces, rather than connected constituents of a biosphere. The human-centrism of “Anthropocene” is thus misleading, as the term fails to encompass the interrelated social and natural processes behind climate change. The remedies proposed by proponents of the Anthropocene to counter-act climate change are potentially limited by the focus on the consequences of human activity, rather than the processes that originally produced the state of affairs. Timothy Clark warns against Moore’s proposed alternative term “the Capitalocene” (and against Žižek’s position in general):

If the deep history of agriculture forms one unavoidable context for thinking in environmental ways about capitalist, communist or other modes of political organization, then to critique capital may remain supremely important, but is also inefficient.130 Donna Haraway similarly argues for a wider scope, identifying alternative conduits to consider the phenomena of climate change, evoking not only the Capitalocene, but also such terms as the Plantationocene and the Chthulucene.131 Nevertheless, the notion of the Capitalocene and the emphasis on capitalism’s effecting of climate change complements a postmodern reading of Mitchell’s epochal vision.

Some of the most interesting commentary on the Anthropocene derives from criticism of the term and its arguable over-emphasis on human agency (without concomitant

128 Jason Moore, “The Capitalocene Part I: On the Nature & Origins of Our Ecological Crisis,” Jason W. Moore, 2014, accessed September 14, 2016, http://www.jasonwmoore.com/uploads/The_Capitalocene__Part_I__June_2014.pdf. 129 Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times, (London: Verso, 2010), 334. 130 Timothy Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept, (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015), 3. 131 Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015), 159. Haraway defines the Plantationocene as the “[…] devastating transformation of diverse kinds of human-tended farms, pastures, and forests into extractive and enclosed plantations, relying on slave labor and other forms of exploited, alienated, and usually spatially transported labor”, and the Cthulucene is an umbrella term that encapsulates the Capitalocene and the Plantationocene and the “dynamic ongoing sym-chthonic forces and powers of which people are a part”. Ibid., 162, 160. attention devoted to the workings of power and capital). The aforementioned criticisms render me reluctant to adopt the terminology of the Anthropocene; yet the general tenor of the concept and many of the arguments concerning the definition are useful in a consideration of Mitchell’s engagement with climate change. I do not think that Mitchell should be considered purely as a “novelist of the Anthropocene”, even though much of his fiction is devoted to this period (and its related ecological crises).132 There are characters and sites represented in his writing that predate the advent of industry and arguably outdate the transition of the ‘Great Dying’ of the Anthropocene. Mitchell’s ludic manipulation of chronology creates temporal hybridity (a planetary concept I will address imminently), and the ancient characters and places that feature in the novel signify the living presence of the Holocene (and earlier still) as a challenge to the man- centric distinction of the Anthropocene.

Cosmopolitanism similarly features definitions that offer insight into aspects of Mitchell’s fiction while being incongruous with other qualities of his work. My principal objection to cosmopolitanism is its Western, colonial ontology and the ramifications of this perspectival position on its theories of interconnectedness. Cosmopolitanism is a concept with a long history and diverse manifestations and, as a result, consensus as to a specific definition is difficult to find. The versions of cosmopolitanism vary greatly according to disciplinary fields, as I will demonstrate momentarily. It is vital to consider the political development of cosmopolitanism as well as the literary version of the theory, insofar as I argue that Mitchell’s fiction systematically rejects the programs of political cosmopolitanism.

Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held have identified a common denominator in cosmopolitan thought: that

in its most basic form, cosmopolitanism maintains that there are moral obligations owed to all human beings based solely on our humanity alone, without reference to race, gender, nationality, ethnicity, culture, religion, political affiliation, state citizenship, or other communal particularities.133 From this basic ethical position emerges cosmopolitan theories of global justice and security, as well as cosmopolitan literature. One of the foundational thinkers for modern

132 Paul Harris, “Introduction: David Mitchell in the Labyrinth of Time,” SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism 44, no. 1 (2015), 5. 133 Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held, The Cosmopolitan Reader, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 1. cosmopolitanism is Immanuel Kant, who asserted that humanity is progressing towards a cosmopolitan future.134 Implicit in this notion of progression is what has been described by Brown and Held as a “naturalist teleology”.135 Kant argued that humans are developing towards a “universal cosmopolitan existence” because this ultimately suits their interests. He envisages this development as taking place on an international stage, citing the efforts which states make to avoid war because it is ultimately detrimental: the effects of war “compel our species to discover a law of equilibrium to regulate the essentially healthy hostility which prevails among the states and is produced by their freedom. Men are compelled to reinforce this law by introducing a system of power, hence a cosmopolitan system of general security”.136 Wallace Brown has thus deduced that “there exist two strands in Kant’s cosmopolitanism. One is concerned with what some might consider a naturalistic teleology and the other is concerned with the formal principles involved in creating universal justice and cosmopolitan law”.137 In terms of the latter concern, Kant and other cosmopolitan political theorists such as Jurgen Habermas and Simon Caney have proposed that there are pre-existing systems that promote cosmopolitan interaction and attitudes. Kant, for example, identifies world trade as a global system promoting the cosmopolitan aim for freedom. Global trade is thus a deterrent to war, for

civil freedom can no longer be so easily infringed without disadvantage to all trades and industries, and especially to commerce, in the event of which the state’s power in its external relations will also decline.138 Trade, in Kant’s analysis, is inducive to peace because it promotes – indeed, is advantaged by – civil freedom. International trade is one example of the increasing interdependency between nation states, and this interdependency results in the establishment of cosmopolitan institutions and legislation. Indeed, Habermas described the contemporary world-system as the “legal and political networks of a pluralist, highly interdependent, yet functionally differentiated global society”.139 Cosmopolitan law is

134 Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose”. In Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held, The Cosmopolitan Reader, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 23. 135 Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held, The Cosmopolitan Reader, 45. 136 Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” 23. 137 Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held, The Cosmopolitan Reader, 45. 138 Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” 24. 139 Jurgen Habermas, “A Political Constitution for the Pluralist World Society?”. In Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held, The Cosmopolitan Reader, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 268. necessitated to navigate this interdependency, especially in response to “globally shared risks”.140 Pheng Cheah has described this interdependency as follows:

The concomitant proliferation of global political institutions radiating from the UN system and organizations and discourses centred on human rights and the rise of a new cosmopolitan culture through transnational migration and global cultural and media flows.141 Berthold Schoene acknowledges that “what cosmopolitanism is, or might be, remains as yet to be clearly defined”.142 While not explicitly defining cosmopolitanism, Schoene does place certain restrictions on what he considers to be “new cosmopolitanism”. He rejects Kant’s “fixed teleological function” and argues that “new cosmopolitanism” “is rooted in the realities of the present rather than mobilising for the future fulfilment of any one or other set of utopian ideals”.143 The key identifier of cosmopolitan fiction, according to Schoene, is “a philosophy of world citizenship which simultaneously transcends the boundaries of the nation-state and descends to the scale of individual rights and responsibilities [with] a particular set of skills and attitudes towards diversity and difference”.144 Schoene also presents three distinct stylistic features of the cosmopolitan novel: it is “strictly realist”, experimentally structured, and characterised by “compositeness”.145

Schoene’s new cosmopolitan framework resembles traditional cosmopolitanism only in that he endorses the ethical position of obligation to humanity irrespective of parochial allegiances. This is not necessarily problematic; however, close textual analysis of the political critiques and historical vision of Mitchell’s novels will demonstrate a contestation of cosmopolitan theories of global security and peace. Several of Mitchell’s novels, in particular Cloud Atlas, offer direct refutation of Kant’s naturalist teleology. The exclusive classification of Mitchell as a cosmopolitan writer would rest tentatively on Schoene’s framework alone, and Schoene, as previously remarked, is emphatic that cosmopolitan literature is opposed to postmodernism. A closer examination of Schoene’s principles of literary cosmopolitanism reveals tensions, some irreconcilable, with aspects of Mitchell’s fiction. Certainly the claim that cosmopolitan literature is

140 Pheng Cheah, “Cosmopolitanism,” Theory, Culture & Society 23, no. 2-3 (2006), 494. 141 Ibid., 492. 142 Berthold Schoene, The Cosmopolitan Novel, 5. 143 Ibid., 17, 10. 144 Ibid., 16. 145 Ibid., 122, 98. experimentally structured is pertinent to a critique of Mitchell’s novels. Whether an experimental structure is sufficient to represent a distinctive cosmopolitan aesthetic, however, remains to be seen.

Schoene also asserts that cosmopolitan fiction is characterised by the

[…] cosmopolitan novel’s compositeness, which is not at all the same as fragmentation. Episodic yet cohesive, compositeness forges narrative assemblage out of a seemingly desultory dispersion of plot and characterisation.146 He insists that there is a distinction between cosmopolitan “compositeness” and postmodern fragmentation - that compositeness assures “assemblage” or at least coherence without homogenising the narrative elements. Postmodern fragmentation, on the other hand, illustrates the absence of metanarrative – the implication that there can be no unity of self or experience. Schoene asserts that “every cosmopolitan novel requires to be understood in its entirety, even if whatever composite integrity it displays remains at best a precarious balancing act of momentarily resisting the pull into dispersion”.147 An examination of the nature of Cloud Atlas’s “assemblage”, however, uncovers vital clues that the interconnection between the characters is fictional. The cohesiveness of the fragments of Cloud Atlas is exposed as literary device – it is the textual illusion of unity. This does not necessarily undermine the theme of interconnectivity; rather it highlights the pivotal role of art in connecting the individual to the world. Each character in Cloud Atlas is a reader or consumer of the stories that have preceded their own narratives. As Jason Howard Mezey has remarked, by “breaking off chapters at moments of revelation (Sonmi-451’s), lost consciousness (Rey’s and Cavendish’s), seasonal change (Frobisher’s), and grammatical linkage (Ewing’s ends after an auxiliary verb but before the main verb), Mitchell structures Cloud Atlas around an intensified sense of readership”.148 The self-conscious undercutting of the novel’s cohesion and the emphasis on textuality and readership suggest that Cloud Atlas cannot feasibly be evoked as in opposition to postmodernism.

Finally, Schoene’s claim that Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas are “strictly realist” texts is problematic, in my view. Without defining or exploring the meaning of realism in

146 Berthold Schoene, The Cosmopolitan Novel, 14. 147 Ibid., 28. 148 Jason Howard Mezey, “‘A Multitude of Drops’: Recursion and Globalization in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas,” Modern Language Studies 40, no. 2 (2011), 17. relation to cosmopolitanism, it might be presumed that Schoene is referring to a brand of modernist mimesis. Indeed, Schoene urges us “to regard the science-fiction and dystopian components of Mitchell’s novels as constitutive of their portrayal of contemporary globality”.149 These “excursions from credulity”, to adopt Bradford’s phrase, certainly offer commentary and criticism of contemporary society and politics. Yet the “noncorpum” character of Ghostwritten, the Atemporals and their nemeses in The Bone Clocks, and indeed the apocalyptic and dystopian futures depicted in these novels and Cloud Atlas, present hyperbolic scenarios of contemporary capital and environmental conditions. These novels offer an admonitory prediction of the future of the planet and human society, yet these predictions can only be considered a form of realism when couched in the terms of Jameson’s conception of the contemporary historical novel. This conception requires the realism of a historical novel to incorporate the “future history”, as it influences contemporaneous interpretation of the present. Jameson’s realism, however, is the realism of late capitalism; that is to say, the realism of a postmodern culture wherein simulacra reign.

In an effort to reconcile the postmodern qualities of Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas with its global scope, Theo D’haen has suggested an alternative classification, the “cosmodern”, derived from Christian Moraru’s ground-breaking Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural. In his analysis of Paul Verhaeghen’s Omega Minor and Cloud Atlas, D’haen concludes that both

[…] are undeniably postmodern in their use of narrative techniques. Yet acts of belief such as advocated in these two novels were hardly imaginable in classic postmodernist fictions. In fact, they run against the grain of classic postmodernism. They also differ from multicultural or postcolonial counterpostmodern works in that they do not advance any specific group or racial identity. Instead, they affirm the humanity of all humankind on a non-hierarchical, non-denominational, non-discriminatory basis, which also sets them apart from the traditional humanism that tended to universalize Western ideas of mankind.150 The problematic aspects of Schoene’s conception of literary cosmopolitanism derive from his insistence on divorcing the cosmopolitan from the postmodern. A novel such as Cloud Atlas is demonstrably postmodern in its aesthetic and the way it imposes conditions of reality, however, the postmodern must be reconciled with a definition of

149 Berthold Schoene, The Cosmopolitan Novel, 98. Emphasis in original. 150 Theo D’haen, “European Postmodernism: The Cosmodern Turn,” Narrative 21, no. 3 (2013), 280. the cosmopolitan if a reading of the novel that addresses its literary style and its planetary vision is to be achieved.

The planetary is a pertinent mode of inquiry because it engages with the supreme importance of capitalism and globalisation as well as the web of life that expands beyond and outside the scope of humanity. Furthermore, it is not plagued by the semantic and substantive problems of Cosmopolitan and Anthropocene discourse. Wai Chee Dimock’s foundational work on the planetary emphasises the role of literature in producing a macrocosmic vision of the world. This vision becomes increasingly important in a globalised world, and Dimock’s work charts how such a vision is produced. She argues that globalisation is not merely a spatial phenomenon, but also a temporal condition. In order to depict globalisation with accuracy, one must account for what Dimock terms “‘planetary time’ in order to signal temporal length joined with spatial width”.151 Literature is demarcated as one of the key “bearers of planetary time” as it is “a linguistic form on hand at every point in remembered history”.152 The reading of a text, according to Dimock, presents a challenge to a linear time/space continuum as the context of the text’s production is brought into contact with the context of the reader. A text that is read in a time or place other than the context of its production is thus a geopolitical and “temporal hybrid”.153 Dimock’s account of literature’s ability to unsettle “territorial sovereignty and…a regime of simultaneity” is consistent with the postmodern defiance to metanarratives of history and chronology.154 Furthermore, Dimock explores the temporal hybridity of texts through examples of intertextuality. In an analysis of Mandelstam’s reading of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, she identifies intertextuality as anachronistic; it makes a text (in this instance, The Divine Comedy) “full of time, densely populated, home to each of the centuries bearing signs of human life”.155 Intertextuality, therefore, is not merely a postmodern technique invoked to highlight a metafictional concern with fictional forms; it is a technique that invokes a sense of planetary time which is “both cumulative and nonsequential”.156

151 Wai Chee Dimock, “Planetary Time and Global Translation”, Common Knowledge 9, no. 3 (2003), 491-2. 152 Ibid., 492. 153 Wai Chee Dimock, “Literature for the Planet”, Publications of the Modern Language Association 116, no. 1 (2001), 179. 154 Ibid., 175. 155 Ibid., 182. 156 Ibid., 182. One criticism of the Anthropocene is that its proponents commit the fallacy of examining the world as a holistic entity. Timothy Clark reflects on this point:

In fact, can anyone describe the Earth as a whole and not use terms, concepts and images derived from the specific categories of life on its surface (apple, forest, blue dot)? Of course not. The Earth is not ‘one’ in the sense of an entity we can see, understand or read as a whole. No matter from how far away or ‘high up’ it is perceived or imagined, or in what different contexts – of cosmology or physics – it is always something we remain ‘inside’ and cannot genuinely perceive from elsewhere.157 The emphasis on hybridity and the “cumulative” nature of time and history ensures that the concept of the planetary does not require the projection of a coherent image of the whole earth. The planetary vision is a mosaic of different perspectives from different places at different times, and is thus in some ways suggestive of Schoene’s notion of compositeness. In keeping with Clark’s criticism of Anthropocene images of the whole earth, it is vital that a planetary vision recognises the slippages, limitations, and tensions between multiple perspectives, as well as their moments of coalescence. Susan Friedman’s proposal of a “planetary modernism” emphasises plurality of representation; she cites Edouard Glissant’s plea “that we write with the consciousness of the diversity of languages and cultures and the richness that these differences bring”.158 Friedman considers the varied understandings of “modernity” across the globe, and argues that the planetary “suggests a capacity to engage simultaneously with local and global modernities”.159 The demand for a literature expressive of the planetary reflects the philosophical presupposition that privileging a grand narrative of truth is flawed and imperialistic. A range of conflicting and complementary perspectives is necessary in the planetary because this ensures that difference is preserved. Neil Turnbull asks the rhetorical question: “Might the planetary earth be the postmodern equivalent of the Cartesian malin genie [evil demon] - that which undermines any idea of a fixed and stable “first principle” of knowing and judging?”160

In “Becoming Planetary”, Min Hyoung Song underscores the egalitarian approach to difference that characterises the planetary. He identifies the distinction between

157 Timothy Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept, 33. 158 Edouard Glissant quoted in Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (La Vergne: Columbia University Press, 2015), 72. 159 Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time, 79. 160 Neil Turnbull quoted in Timothy Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge, 39. planetarity and globalization, arguing that “there is, in short, something sovereign about what gets signified by globalization, a nomos that divides, restricts, hierarchalizes, and criminalizes”.161 Envisioning the planetary, by contrast, is “an act of deterritorialization…a planetary becoming, one that involves a keen interest in social relations and the ecological concerns that are increasingly turning into such an important factor in understanding [these social relations]”.162 Song’s reading of Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange informs his definition of planetary fiction, wherein:

narratives…ubiquitously jump from location to location, ceaselessly occupy one perspective and then another, switch between the first-person singular to a free indirect speech that bounds from character to character without respect for nationality or language, and jumble past events with present occurrences.163 This definition resonates with the structure, diverse settings, and polyphonic narration of Mitchell’s work, however, it is important to note that Song considers planetary fiction as distinct from the postmodern. Song’s rationale for this distinction is dependent upon his (and Rachel Adams’) assessment of postmodernism as “historically and stylistically bounded” to the Cold War era and “governed by a sense of paranoia”.164 Adams indicts Jameson’s theorisation of postmodernism as the cultural dominant of late capitalism because, “postmodernism is an unwieldy category that encompasses such strikingly different historical contexts and expressive forms that it threatens to become incoherent”.165 This disavowal of the postmodern in relation to planetary fiction is uneasy, however, as both Adams and Song concede that the formal techniques identifiable with planetary writing are analogous with postmodern literary techniques. It is, therefore, not incongruous to consider planetary fiction (as defined by Song) as having its genesis, at least formally, in postmodernism.

A central thematic feature of planetary fiction, according to Song, is a concern with the ecological impact of human activity and the consequent effect of climate change upon societies. In “The Ecological Blind Spot in Postmodernism”, Jonathon Coope argues that “postmodernism still appears ecologically under-dimensioned”.166 Coope’s review

161 Min Hyoung Song, “Becoming Planetary”, American Literary History 23, no. 3 (2011), 568. 162 Ibid., 557. 163 Ibid., 555. 164 Rachel Adams, “The Ends of America, the Ends of Postmodernism,” Twentieth-Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal 53, no.3 (2007), 250. Min Hyoung Song, “Becoming Planetary”, 555. 165 Rachel Adams, “The Ends of America, the Ends of Postmodernism,” 250. 166 Jonathon Coope, “The Ecological Blind Spot in Postmodernism,” New Formations 64, (2008), 78. of the work of the ecological writers Theodore Roszak and Charlene Spretnak identifies the theoretical frameworks that result in environmental neglect. Roszak, in particular, asserts that capitalism “reduces persons to consumers and environment to a resource”, and that the reduction of the environment to commodity reflects the accepted “reality principle”, which in contemporary society is “the scientific reality principle”.167 The consequence of accepting a scientific reality principle is that, in Roszak’s words, “the natural world [is conceived as] an alien and meaningless collection of ‘inferior and unfeeling objects’ with which we have no ethical relationship”.168 Roszak’s relegation of reality to constructed systems and his critique of the totalising effect of the “scientific reality principle” are consistent with the postmodern resistance to metanarratives. Roszak writes further that the “scientific reality principle” drives humans to “split the “inside” from the “outside” and then denigrate the subjective”.169 The postmodern refutation of the internal/external divide, the loss of the individual ego, could be adopted as a philosophical basis for ecological activism. Furthermore, Roszak’s critique of capitalism aligns with that of Jameson and also with Mitchell’s sustained interest in climate change as the product of rampant consumerism. There may well be an “ecological blind spot” in postmodernism, yet there is some affinity between postmodernism and an ecological consciousness; indeed, this philosophical complementarity is manifest in the novels of David Mitchell.

In synthesising these accounts of the planetary, I have arrived at the following definition of planetary postmodernism which corresponds with Jameson’s hypothesis for a “new political art”: Planetary postmodern texts produce a vision of the past, present and future of the planet and the world-space of multinational capital. This vision is constituted by individual, often spatially confused, socio-political perspectives situated in medias res, thus accounting for the experience of the postmodern condition whilst reinstating the individual as a part of an interconnected planetary system. The fate of the environment and human societies is therefore intertwined in these texts, granting the individual the capacity to act for change. The critical vigour invested in theorising the web of life (whether under the banner of the planetary, Cosmopolitanism or the Anthropocene) inevitably leads to reflections on utopia. At the heart of these theories is a concern about climate change and global citizenship, and the ways in which these two

167 Ibid., 80, 81. 168 Theodore Roszak, quoted in: Coope, “The Ecological Blind Spot in Postmodernism,” 81. 169 Ibid., 82. issues are depicted and discussed is inherently political. The compulsion to view the web of life on a macrocosmic level stems from the desire to expose the fact that our actions and interactions may have consequences beyond our comprehension. In the case of the Anthropocene, the point of defining the current epoch in terms of humanity’s environmental impact is to support thinking on how ecological equilibrium can be restored. The proposed programs for achieving such restoration are utopic in aim – they seek environmental conservation without compromising development and the convenience of modern-day (first world) living. Planetary fiction similarly illuminates environmental crisis through its macrocosmic scope, but the nature or possibility of utopia is ambiguous. The novels of David Mitchell engage with ideas of utopia and dystopia concomitant with their depiction of environmental crisis and exploitative human relations. Claeys’ description of the dystopic is particularly apposite for a consideration of the dystopic aspects of Mitchell’s oeuvre:

[…] the literary dystopia functions as a more blatant, perhaps less romantic, nostalgic statement of loss, particularly of liberty, by large numbers of human beings, in the face of both modern political despotism and global capitalism, as well as other external threats to humanity, such as the diminution of resources.170 Global capital, political despotism and the diminution of resources are the abstract antagonists in Mitchell’s novels. Furthermore, the rapid advance of technology and the associated means of surveillance are implicated in the apocalyptic future predicted by Mitchell. Nevertheless, and as was noted in the introduction to this thesis, Mitchell’s fiction is marked by a hopeful, humanist ethos. Cloud Atlas culminates with Adam Ewing’s rousing commitment to social justice and The Bone Clocks concludes with a glimpse of salvation in the form of the ‘Prescients’ – a scientific community dedicated to conserving civilisation (and the environment) in the aftermath of nuclear disaster. Mitchell’s fiction might therefore be more usefully situated amongst texts such as Her, The Circle, Elysium, and 2312, which, as Peter Marks has contended, “fuse the eutopian and dystopian in distinct ways that sketch out new worlds in which surveillance plays very different roles”.171 The novels engage with the construction of utopian and dystopian narratives and how they relate to conceptions of time, with critiques of both

170 Gregory Claeys, “News From Somewhere: Enhanced Sociability and the Composite Definition of Utopia and Dystopia,” History 98, no. 330 (2013), 172. 171 Peter Marks, Imagining Surveillance: Eutopian and Dystopian Literature and Film, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 156. utopian and anti-utopian positions delivered through a planetary lens that tracks the rise and fall of dystopian regimes and utopian communities. Jameson argues in Antinomies of Realism that Mitchell’s focus on the narrative constructs of the future allows a unique understanding of the limitations and problems that prevent viable plans for social improvement. By exposing the limitations of what he considers the two dominant narratives of the future based upon patterns of human behaviour (progression to apocalypse or cyclical processes of exploitation), Jameson argues that “we might conceivably be able again to think politically and productively, to envisage a condition of genuine revolutionary difference, to begin once again to think Utopia”.172 Postmodern metafiction in conjunction with planetary scope enables this distinctive position, and I argue that Mitchell’s aim is not to produce a single vision of utopia, but rather to reframe what multiple, contingent utopias might look like.

The ensuing analysis of each novel by David Mitchell is informed by my conception of the “planetary postmodern”. This framework requires the acceptance of certain definitions of postmodernism (relieved of the criteria of periodization and political apathy) and the opening up of the conception of the planetary to include postmodern incredulity to metanarratives. The purpose of constructing this framework is to support my response to the fundamental research question: how does Mitchell reconcile postmodern literary techniques with a vision of the planetary? I have theorised in this chapter how such reconciliation might be achieved; it is the task of this dissertation to identify this reconciliation through close textual analysis, and to ask the logical next question beyond that – why would Mitchell (and other authors) seek to depict the world in this way? Is this a step closer to the “new political art” of the postmodern era desired and predicted by Fredric Jameson?

172 Jameson, Fredric. Antinomies of Realism, 308-9. Ghostwritten: Being in a Postmodern World

“Laws may help you hack through the jungle, but no law changes the fact you’re in a jungle” – Bat Segundo173

David Mitchell’s first novel explores the nature of Being and the construction of identity in a globalized, postmodern world. Mitchell once described himself as a “thesis and antithesis guy”, more inclined to consider the complexities of a situation than to champion one perspective.174 Ghostwritten can be read as an exercise in thesis and antithesis. The novel reflects on the individual as a constituent of a global network, and the ways in which these interconnections (both social and environmental) affect individual life. Ghostwritten is thus a useful starting point when considering Mitchell’s oeuvre, not only because it is his first work, but because it establishes the planetary scope and personal postmodern crises that predominate (and are expanded upon in) each of his successive novels.

The very title of Ghostwritten indicates to the reader that the ensuing narrative will engage with the ineffable – with the intangible forces that impact upon on human life but seemingly resist definition. The epigraph to the novel is a quotation from Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey which further reinforces the inconceivability of these forces:

… And I, who claim to know so much more, isn’t it possible that even I have missed the very spring within the spring? Some say that we shall never know, and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.175 The epigraph articulates the classical tension between fate and chance, and the nine protagonists of Ghostwritten contemplate this dynamic from different perspectives. All, however, are united in their desire to find their own, personal utopias (which, for some, extends to a vision of global utopia). The possibility of utopia depends upon whether one accepts the influence of fate (which could be tragic or utopic) or considers life to be a matter of chance. The forces of fate and chance inevitably play upon notions of Being and identity. Fate legitimises and fixes identity whilst relieving the individual of

173 David Mitchell, Ghostwritten, (London: Sceptre, 1999), 389. Further references to this edition will be included in the text in parentheses with the acronym “GW”. 174 David Mitchell, interview by Kelly Frame, 25 May 2015, Sydney. 175 Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, (London: Longman’s, Green and Co., 1942), 18. control, whereas chance endows the individual with agency to affect the future yet subjects the identity of the individual to a state of flux. The characters of Ghostwritten are arrested (to varying degrees) in a postmodern moment of crisis. They each reflect upon their identity and their role in the world, expressing doubts and searching for self- affirmation. Depicting the postmodern crisis of identity and exploring the ramifications of capitalist culture on the planet (and on the planet’s future), Ghostwritten can be considered as both a postmodern and a planetary work of fiction. It reframes Being in planetary terms – as spatially defined and constituted by the past, present and future. The scope of the novel is planetary as the narrative spans the globe from East to West, with expository accounts of the history of a place as well as the contemporary moment. The climax of the novel – a nuclear standoff between superpowers – presents the concern for the future of the world and humanity that has come to define Mitchell’s fiction. The tension between fate and chance is elevated to the global stage, and the reader is left to ponder the question: is humanity by its nature destined to destroy itself and the planet, or is there a utopian alternative?

The following discussion of Ghostwritten will begin with a discussion of Being – as it is through the perspectives of individuals and their existential crises that Mitchell depicts his postmodern world. Jonathan Boulter’s ground-breaking article, “Posthuman Temporality: Mitchell’s Ghostwritten”, provides a cogent reading of Mitchell’s novel with close reference to Heidegger’s Being and Time. I will draw upon Boulter’s analysis as well as Heidegger’s work to produce a framework for understanding planetary Being. The crises of Quasar, the first protagonist introduced in the novel, are experienced by the other characters in the novel, but the interpretation of, and reaction to, these crises of self vary widely. I will therefore examine each narrative in turn, taking into account the novel’s engagement with questions of authorship and authority, the hyperreal, totalising metanarratives of morality and history, ghostliness, the nature of time, the possibility of utopia, and the relation of all this to the postmodern planetary subject.

Boulter contends that:

…either Mitchell’s posthuman subject is nothing but another kind of human, or Heidegger has offered a framework for understanding the emergence of a new kind of entity entirely: the posthuman, now standing in relation to futurity always already past and coming into Being, in a subjective position defined neither as subjective nor objective, but trajective.176 The ostensibly “posthuman” characters of Ghostwritten are the noncorpum (a metaphysical being that moves between human hosts), the Zookeeper (a sentient computer program), and the numerous ghosts that materialise in a number of chapters within the novel. These characters respectively represent an existence after death (the noncorpum and the ghosts) and a physically non-human existence (the Zookeeper). Boulter, however, expands this notion of the posthuman to include the cult-member, Quasar, who narrates the first and final chapters of the novel. As will be discussed in greater depth later in this chapter, Quasar chooses to abdicate his “inner self” (GW 23). This prompts Boulter to ask the question: “how can [Quasar’s] subject position, his position as a human, be his ownmost [sic] if it is abdicated?”177 The notion of an “ownmost” being derives from Heidegger’s conceptualisation of Being, or to use his term, Dasein. Heidegger defines Being temporally –

Dasein is as it already was, and it is ‘what’ it already was. It is its past, whether explicitly or not. And this is so not only that its past is, as it were, pushing itself along ‘behind’ it, and that Dasein possesses what is past as a property which is still present-at-hand and which sometimes has after-effects upon it: Dasein ‘is’ its past in the way of its own Being, which, to put it roughly, ‘historicizes’ out of its future on each occasion.178 Simon Critchley succinctly explains Dasein thus: “what it means for a human being to be is to exist temporally in the stretch between birth and death”.179 It is important to note that Heidegger rejects a linear construction of time – he refutes a “distinction between time and eternity”.180 The notion that Dasein is its past, present, and future, is not to suggest that these aspects of Being are fragmented, but that these aspects are consolidated and cohere the Being in question.

176 Jonathon Boulter, “Posthuman Temporality: Mitchell’s Ghostwritten,” SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism 44, no. 1 (2015), 35. 177 Ibid., 23. 178 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, (trans.) Edward Robinson and John Macquarrie, (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 41. 179 Simon Critchley, “Being and Time, Part 2: On ‘Mineness’,” The Guardian, June 15, 2009, accessed March 31, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/jun/15/heidegger-being-time- philosophy. 180 Simon Critchley, “Being and Time, Part 8: Temporality,” The Guardian, July 27, 2009, accessed March 31, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/jul/27/heidegger-being-time- philosophy. Boulter concludes that the posthuman is, semantically and literally, “haunted by the human”; it is “this boundary or limit figure that emerges as it looks back on what was (temporally and ontologically) and towards what may be possible, futurally”.181 Furthermore, “the posthuman is conditioned by an all-too-human desire to be human”.182 Boulter identifies that the condition of posthumanity is deeply constituted by Dasein, perhaps even the progression of Dasein in the future.

Boulter’s conception of the posthuman, through Blanchot’s (who in turn argues through Levinas’) notion of “subjectivity without any subject”, resembles the impact of postmodernism on a discrete sense of self. All the characters in Ghostwritten experience challenges to their sense of individuality. While this may appear to be evidence of anxiety (which is more akin to self-reflection or existential reverie in Heideggerian thought), the onset of urbanisation and technology of the postmodern era problematizes the subject’s capacity to be open to the world, that is to say, “Being-in-the-world”. Furthermore, whilst anxiety is a state of authentic Being, according to Heidegger, because it is a withdrawal from the world, the characters of Ghostwritten cannot emancipate themselves from the hyperreal. The narrator of the second chapter, Satoru, for example, expends much of his narrative explicating the “places” people seek to find a sense of authentic self, rather than a withdrawal from place. Boulter’s posthuman concept extends Heidegger’s notion of Being-in-the-world from a temporal condition to a spatial condition: “Being-in-the-world is determined not merely by its relation to temporality – to a futurity articulated by an essential relation to an ineluctable historicality – but by its relation to space and movement”.183 The noncorpum and the Zookeeper are “defined by […] spatial encounters”, possessing and moving from entities of different geographical origin, be they human or technological.184 Heidegger’s conceptualisation of Dasein, in conjunction with Boulter’s revision of Dasein in the context of the posthuman which resembles the postmodern subject, resonates with planetary notions of time and space. Planetary time, that is to say, temporal hybridity, is constitutive of Dasein. Planetary space is deterritorialized, and the figuration of the posthuman (and therefore, the postmodern individual) spatially, even transnationally, is a method of deterritorializing the subject.

181 Jonathon Boulter, “Posthuman Temporality: Mitchell’s Ghostwritten,” 25. 182 Ibid., 28. 183 Ibid., 34. 184 Ibid. The framework of Being and the posthuman/postmodern subject is applicable to the depiction of the protagonists throughout Ghostwritten, none more so than Quasar, the narrator of the first chapter of Ghostwritten, entitled “Okinawa”. Quasar’s narrative is especially significant because it establishes the novel’s postmodern setting as well as the crisis of cognitive mapping. Quasar has become a fugitive after having perpetrated a gas attack on the Tokyo subway at the behest of the cult leader, “His Serendipity”. Quasar’s religious community, the “Fellowship”, is a thinly-veiled fictionalisation of the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo, which committed the catastrophic sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway in 1995, killing twelve people and injuring up to five thousand commuters and station staff. The guru Shoko Asahara (reimagined as “His Serendipity” in Ghostwritten) founded Aum Shinrikyo and demanded that its members renounce the world, sign over all material assets and wealth, and pledge unconditional fealty and obedience to the guru. The gas attack was orchestrated by the guru and carried out by cult members according to the doctrine of Vajrayana. The attackers believed themselves to be facilitating the salvation of the victims by forcing them to be reborn into a state conducive for enlightenment. The attackers themselves would accrue credit for this act of “salvation”.185 In an interview conducted in 1997 Hiroyuki Kano, a former member of Aum Shinrikyo, explained the logic of Vajrayana:

If by killing another person you raised him up, that person would be happier than he would have been living his life. So I do understand that path. But that should only be done by someone who has the ability to discern the process of transmigration and rebirth. Otherwise, you’d better leave it alone. If I’d been able to perceive what happens to a person after their death, and help them rise to a higher level – then maybe even I would have been involved.186 In Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attacks and the Japanese Psyche, Haruki Murakami identifies the attacks (occurring so closely after the Kobe earthquake and the collapse of Japan’s “bubble” economy) as a turning point in Japanese history that “ushered in a period of critical inquiry into the very roots of the Japanese state”.187 Viewed in this light, these epoch-shaping events signify the beginning of the Japanese postmodern era. Mr Fujimoto, a minor character from the second chapter of Ghostwritten, expresses a similar reaction to the attacks, remarking that:

185 Walter Laqueur, “Postmodern Terrorism,” Foreign Affairs 75, no. 5 (1996), 32. 186 Haruki Murakami, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, trans. Alfred Birnbaum and Philip Gabriel, (London: Vintage, 2003), 227. 187 Ibid., 206. Since the gas attack on the subway, watching those pictures on TV, watching the police investigate like a crack squad of blind tortoises, I’ve been trying to understand…Why do things happen at all? What is it that stops the world simply…seizing up? (GW 61) The significance of the novel’s East-Asian postmodern context, rather than a Cold War, Western European setting, is twofold: the choice of setting emphasises postmodernism as the cultural condition of late capitalism, and it draws attention to postmodernism’s relation to American imperialism, a point which is articulated by Quasar in a tirade against the homogenisation of the high street throughout Japan and the world. The novel challenges Eurocentrism by structurally privileging narratives and histories from the East. The scope of Ghostwritten is planetary, but the itinerary of the novel (scanning from East to West) reflects a postmodern position.

The sarin gas attacks profoundly shocked the citizens of Japan, a nation which had hitherto regarded itself as relatively crime-free and exempt from the blight of terrorism. Murakami attempted to deconstruct the people’s response to the gas attack and the rationale of Aum Shinrikyo in Underground, a non-fiction book comprising interviews with victims, former and current members of Aum, and essays by Murakami himself. It is entirely feasible that Murakami’s book informed Mitchell’s depiction of Quasar and the implicit critique of Aum Shinrikyo; Ghostwritten and number9dream extensively allude to several of Murakami’s novels. Quasar suffers a nightmare in which he encounters an evil presence that recalls Murakami’s “INKlings” from Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Quasar’s narrative and Murakami’s novel both explore the mindset behind acts of terrorism, and how this reflects rather than being an abberation from the postmodern condition. In Ghostwritten, Quasar meets a teacher who essentially articulates the novel’s interpretation of the Aum phenomenon:

‘Society…is an outer abdication. We abdicate certain freedoms, and in return we get civilisation. We get protection from death by starvation, bandits and cholera. It’s a fair deal. Signed on our behalf by our educational system on the day we are born. However, we all have an inner self, that decides to what degree we honour this contract. This inner self is our own responsibility. I fear that many of the young men and women in the Fellowship handed this inner responsibility to their Guru, to do with as he pleased. And that,’ she flicked the newspaper, ‘is what he did with it’. (GW 23) The teacher reflects upon the reasons why the young men and women in the Fellowship would subordinate themselves to this extent: ‘Maybe there are many answers. Some get a kick out of self- abasement and servitude. Some are afraid or lonely. Some crave the camaraderie of the persecuted. Some want to be big fish in a small pond. Some want magic. Some want revenge on teachers and parents who promised success would deliver all. They need shinier myths that will never be soiled by becoming true. The handing over of one’s will is a small price to pay, for the believers. They aren’t going to need a will in their New Earth’. (GW23) This explanation for the appeal of Aum Shinrikyo to its followers is reinforced by Murakami, who argues that the followers sought to assuage their feeling of isolation in the world by submitting their autonomy to Shoko Asahara, thereby “sparing them the anxiety of confronting each new situation on their own, and delivering them from any need to think for themselves”.188 In short, Aum Shinrikyo offers the consolation of a worldview in which Fate presides. Significantly, the members and former members of the cult that were interviewed by Murakami evinced a common motivation for joining the cult - an exhaustion with the materialism of Japan’s capitalist, postmodern culture. Peter Childs and James Green argue that “the Fellowship’s fundamentalist discourse is engaged in an effort to re-create a putatively lost world unblemished by the global flows of modernity”.189 Quasar clearly conceives of modernity as a “blemish”, demonstrative in his description of Okinawa:

But for the background band of Pacific aquamarine this city could be any tentacle of Tokyo. The usual red-and-white TV transmitter, broadcasting the government’s subliminal command frequencies. The usual department stores rising like windowless temples, dazzling the unclean into compliance. The urban districts, the factories pumping out poison into the air and water supplies. Fridges abandoned in wastegrounds of lesser trash. What grafted- on pieces of ugliness are their cities! (GW 4) The city is unnatural and culturally indistinct – it is “grafted-on” to the landscape, the term implying that the city is not only unnatural, but also foreign. The graft ultimately poisons and transforms the landscape into “wastegrounds”, anticipating the toxic “deadlands” featured in Cloud Atlas. Quasar’s fixation on the uniformity of the city – the “usual” shops and transmitters – evokes Jameson’s crisis of cognitive mapping. Okinawa is not distinguishable from Tokyo, and Tokyo is simply a “tentacle” of the global network of capitalism and urbanisation. Quasar notes that there are “the same shops as anywhere else…Burger King, Benetton, Nike…High streets are becoming the

188 Ibid., 201. 189 Peter Childs and James Green, Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels, 146-7. same all over the world, I suppose” (GW 12). The transformation of Japan into a globalised, commercial space is disorienting, and Quasar interprets it as an assault on individuality and agency. The loss of a discrete sense of self caused by multinational capitalism is, in Quasar’s view, a “betrayal”. In his words, the people of Japan have “all been betrayed by a society evolving into markets for Disney and McDonald’s. All that sacrifice, to build what? To build an unsinkable aircraft carrier for the United States” (GW 8). The sense of disaffection with the modern world established in Quasar’s narrative permeates the novel; it is, to use Childs’ and Green’s phrase, a “node through which the rest of the stories pass”.190 By framing his novel with the narrative of the “villain” or “antagonist” (“antihero” is rather too honorific a classification), Mitchell emphasises the darker side of identity in a postmodern age.

On the one hand, Quasar’s narrative highlights his radicalism and lack of self-awareness through dramatic irony. His earnest belief in “yogic flyers” and “alpha quotient” produces a critical distance between reader and narrator. His sense of alienation from the world, however, resonates with the perspectives of the succeeding narrators of the novel. Murakami remarks that “the Aum “phenomenon” disturbs precisely because it is not someone else’s affair. It shows us a distorted image of ourselves in a manner none of us could have foreseen”.191 Boulter argues that the loss of a discrete sense of self, a feeling of “rootlessness”, “allows Quasar to follow through on his terrorist act; but it is, crucially, and we need always to keep this in mind, a sense of rootlessness that precedes his joining the cult, a sense that constantly acts as a nostalgic trace to his previous life”.192 Quasar has thus abdicated his inner sense of self in return for a new (shared) identity as a member of the Fellowship. He shares the collective subjectivity of the Fellowship without defining himself as an individual subject. Murakami’s assessment of the cult members prefigures Boulter’s conception of the posthuman cult member:

[…] by tuning in, by merging themselves with Shoko Asahara’s “greater, more profoundly unbalanced” Self, they attained a kind of pseudo self-determination. Instead of launching an assault on society as individuals, they handed over the entire strategic responsibility to Asahara. We’ll have one “Self-power versus the system” set menu, please.193

190 Ibid., 147. 191 Haruki Murakami, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, 198. 192 Jonathon Boulter, “Posthuman Temporality: Mitchell’s Ghostwritten,” 22. 193 Haruki Murakami, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, 201. The Fellowship promises a utopic future, one that is cleansed of the materialism and isolation of late capitalist society. Of course, this conception of utopia is undeniably dystopic for the people outside of the cult community, and contributes to Mitchell’s more general critique of utopian programs that enforce conformity.

Quasar, “the last of the Tokyo cleansers to evade capture”, resembles the historical perpetrator Yasuo Hayashi, who fled to a remote island and was not apprehended until December 1996.194 Murakami notes that Hayashi, who was popularly referred to as the “Murder Machine”, “reputedly carried with him a small Buddhist altar to atone for the lives he’d taken”.195 Quasar progressively succumbs to doubt and guilt throughout the “Okinawa” chapter. He is haunted by the memory of a baby that had been on the train when he released the deadly gas. The memory undergoes revision as Quasar struggles to suppress his qualms. His first recollection of the baby is an indifferent, fleeting observation, yet later in the chapter he observes about the child: “The little baby girl in the woolly cap, she had liked me. How could she have liked me? It was just some facial reflex, no doubt…I didn’t smile back. I looked away. I wish I had smiled back” (GW 29). Quasar gradually internalizes his image of the baby:

The baby in the woolly cap, strapped to her mother’s back, opened her eyes. They were my eyes. A disembodied voice was singing a chorus over and over again. And reflected in my eyes was her face. She knew what I was going to do. And she asked me not to. But she was fated to die anyway, Quasar, when the comet comes! (GW 25) Not only does Quasar relate to the child’s vulnerability and innocence, but the child evidently comes to function as a projection of Quasar’s own conscience. Quasar is caught by the dilemma of fate and chance. He assuages his guilt by affirming that fate had already determined the child’s death. By removing chance from the equation, Quasar attempts to convince himself that he is not making a choice for which he is responsible, but rather that he is an instrument of fate. Finally, the dispersion of the body – eyes, faces, and a voice are “disembodied” in this fragmented scene – suggests that people are not removed from each other, but inextricably connected. Quasar cannot escape the reality that his actions profoundly impact others. He consciously refuses to articulate his guilt; nevertheless, the images and sounds that accompany his memories

194 Ibid., 127. 195 Ibid. betray a divided conscience: “If the noises ever became words – not now, not yet. Not ever. Where would it end?” (GW 18). In a metafictional sense, the noises of his conscience are never put into words. The “Okinawa” chapter concludes without offering closure; Quasar’s fate and his burgeoning guilt are never resolved. The unresolved ending of “Okinawa” reflects Mitchell’s refusal to offer a counter-argument to Quasar’s metanarrative of Being. Quasar’s narrative therefore operates as a challenge to the reader to question his or her own narratives of Being.

Ghostwritten shifts location and focus in the second chapter, entitled “Tokyo”. The chapter is narrated by Satoru, an orphan boy who works in a record store. The “Tokyo” chapter itself recalls the fiction of Murakami – Mitchell’s debt to Murakami will be explored in greater detail in the next chapter of this thesis. Satoru’s narrative communicates the crisis of cognitive mapping. He is a young man struggling to achieve a coherent sense of identity and belonging. The primary obstacle to self-discovery is his overwhelming urban environment. His perception of Tokyo (similar in many ways to that of Quasar) is as an ever-growing, immeasurable entity “rewriting itself” (GW 37):

Twenty million people live and work in Tokyo. It’s so big that nobody really knows where it stops. It’s long since filled up the plain, and now it’s creeping up the mountains to the west and reclaiming land from the bay in the east. (GW 37) Satoru directly associates the encroaching city-space with his crisis of identity: “in smaller cities people can use the space around them to insulate themselves, to remind themselves of who they are. Not in Tokyo” (GW 37). The people of Tokyo, in Satoru’s estimation, are forced to turn to the hyperreal in order to consolidate their self-image. Place, as he conceives of this, is a necessary precondition for the experience of Heideggerian anxiety. He emphasises the significance of “place” to the construction of identity, and the culture of late capitalism requires one “to make your place inside your head” (GW 37). Place is integral to human identity, as “people with no place are those who end up throwing themselves onto the tracks” (GW 38). Satoru’s place is produced by the hyperreal, it “comes into existence through jazz music” (GW 38). His emotions are expressed through song titles, and the record shop becomes indistinguishable from the place created in his mind.

Satoru falls in love with a young woman named Tomoyo, whose striking characteristic is an air of authenticity. She is contrasted with her cousins, whom Satoru labels “magazine girls” (GW 42). His adoration of Tomoyo is expressed in terms that nevertheless reveal Satoru’s incapacity to step outside the hyperreal: “she was so real, the others were cardboard cut-outs beside her. Real things had happened to her to make her how she was, and I wanted to know them, and read them, like a book” (GW 41). The refiguring of Tomoyo as a book to be read, rather than a person to be engaged with, implies that Satoru is constrained and conditioned by his hyperreal place. He relates to her as a constructed narrative – just like the songs on which he bases his identity (as a substitute for a grand narrative of Being). His distaste for Tomoyo’s cousins ultimately reflects a hegemonic ordering of “places”, or texts. He critiques the “magazine girls” for being fake because they are not scarred by suffering:

[…] these magazine girls have nothing real about them. They have magazine expressions, speak magazine words and carry magazine fashion accessories. They’ve chosen to become this. I don’t know whether or not to blame them. Getting scarred isn’t nice. But look! As shallow, and glossy, and identical, and throwaway, as magazines. (GW 42) The affinity between Tomoyo and Satoru is founded on a shared “place”. By listening intently to the music, she enters into Satoru’s metaphoric place. The chapter concludes on a hopeful note with Satoru’s decision to give up his physical space – the record shop – and follow Tomoyo to Hong Kong.

The hyperrealism of Satoru’s language and “place” is an exemplary manifestation of postmodern pastiche and parody. The “places” to which he refers are invariably unoriginal – symptomatic of the postmodern condition in which originality is no longer possible. The adoption of different art forms or cultural expressions is, however, subversive. Satoru explains this phenomenon when he is in conversation with two Scottish women in a bar:

Then one of them asked why Japanese kids try to ape American kids? The clothes, the rap music, the skateboards, the hair. I wanted to say that it’s not America they’re aping, it’s the Japan of their parents that they’re rejecting. And since there’s no home-grown counter culture, they just take hold of the nearest one to hand, which happens to be American. But it’s not American culture exploiting us. It’s us exploiting it. (GW 44) Satoru thus reframes the appropriation of American culture as a form of rebellion, an argument that recalls Hutcheon’s account of pastiche as a political mode. The turn to pastiche is instigated by the disenchantment of the young Japanese with grand narratives that do not correspond with their experience of the world – in this case, with the grand narratives of their parents and traditional Japanese culture. By resorting to the narratives of American culture, Japanese youths recast themselves as citizens of a global culture defined by late capitalism. Unlike their parents, they embrace what Posadas describes as “the impossibility of locating a ‘Japan’ not already mediated and subsumed under the logics of global modernity”.196

Satoru’s reverie on being and belonging in a global system is punctuated early in the chapter by a significant moment of serendipity – when he decides to answer the office phone despite having just locked up the record store. The phone call is from Quasar who believes he is calling the Fellowship’s Secret Service. He recites the code: “the dog needs to be fed” (GW 54). Satoru dismisses the call as a random prank, but it has the tangential significance of causing him to delay leaving the shop. As a result of this delay, he encounters Tomoyo and the two are able to converse and effectively begin their relationship. Satoru reflects that “if that phone hadn’t rung at that moment, and if I hadn’t taken the decision to go back and answer it, then everything that happened afterwards wouldn’t have happened” (GW 54). He is struck by the sensation that the circumstances which have culminated in his reunion with Tomoyo are too good to be true and he has the uncanny feeling that his life is being ghost-written: “for a moment I had an odd sensation of being in a story that someone was writing, but soon that sensation too was being swallowed up” (GW 56). The reader is aware that Satoru is indeed in a story, and this self-reflexive passage illustrates how fate or design requires existence to be ordered into a narrative. The conscious correlation between instances of fate and the fictional prompts the question of whether fate can only exist (or be recognised) within narratives. Satoru himself expresses doubt about fate as he daydreams of a chance encounter with his mysterious father: “the city is vast, but there’s always someone who knows someone whom someone knows. Anonymity doesn’t muffle coincidence: it makes the coincidences more outlandish” (GW 44). Satoru (and the reader) cannot settle on the primacy of fate or chance. The metafictional image of Satoru “being in a story” could reflect a postmodern incredulity to metanarratives of fate. Alternatively, the image could simply highlight the importance of perspective. Fate is far more easily identified on a macrocosmic level than from the perspective of an individual character in medias res. I will expand upon this point later

196 Baryon Posadas, “Remediations of ‘Japan’ in number9dream,” 81. in this chapter, as it is expressly considered by the protagonist of the “London” section of the novel.

At the end of “Tokyo”, Satoru reflects upon what he should base his life on – his “place” or a relationship which requires him to move away from his home. He concludes with the rhetorical question: “if not love, then what?” (GW 63). A “place”, as it is defined by Satoru, resembles utopia in both senses of the word – it is a good place and a place that cannot be (in a postmodern context). His decision to reframe his “place” to centre upon love and not the record store marks his emergence as a deterritorialized subject. Utopia is no longer a physical state, but a state of mind characterised by a sense of belonging. Satoru and Quasar both seek belonging, even if they differ in their perceptions of what that belonging (utopia) might look like.

The third chapter of the novel, entitled “Hong Kong”, depicts the pitfalls of the pursuit of a capitalist utopia: the accumulation of wealth. Mitchell juxtaposes the idealisation of love with that of wealth in a scene in which the “Hong Kong” chapter intersects with the “Tokyo” narrative. Neal Brose (the narrator of the third chapter) shares a restaurant table with Satoru and Tomoyo, who are demonstrably besotted with each other. Neal expresses regret about his life as a lawyer working for a high-profile firm in Hong Kong.197 He has embezzled a significant amount of money, his wife has left him, and his apartment is haunted by the mischievous ghost of a young girl. Neal exemplifies the fragmented state of the postmodern subject, and Mitchell symbolises his fractured identity through ghostly figures:

For the last few months I’ve been living with three women. One was a ghost, who is now a woman. One was a woman, who is now a ghost. One is a ghost, and always will be. But this isn’t a ghost story: the ghost is in the background, where she has to be. If she was in the foreground she’d be a person. (GW 96) The ghost who is now a woman is Neal’s maid; he would see the effects of her presence in his home, but rarely encounter her in person. She becomes a woman when he begins an affair with her after separating from his wife, Katy, who has left their home (thereby figuratively becoming a ghost). The ghost that “always will be” a ghost is the young girl. According to Neal’s neighbour, Mrs Feng, the ghost girl could be an unwanted child left to die in ancient times; a child killed by the Japanese during the occupation;

197 Neal Brose appears as a wily and predatory child in Mitchell’s fourth novel, Black Swan Green. the illicit child of “a gwai lo man and a maid” who is murdered after the affair ends; or a baby girl born to a couple who kill the child out of fear that they would be unable to provide a dowry (GW 92). Whatever she might be, her presence is a constant reminder to Neal and his wife of their inability to conceive. Neal exacerbates their fertility problem by refusing to move out of the haunted apartment (which Mrs Feng alleges has bad energy) or to explore alternate methods of assisting conception. The ghostly child’s presence (a symbol of a future not fully realised) contributes to the deterioration and eventual end of the couple’s relationship. In one scene, the ghost girl deadlocks the door from the inside, preventing Katy from opening it and then only unlocking it for Neal (GW 96). Neal’s narrative concludes with a vision of the little ghost girl, taking his hand and leading him away from the crowd gathered around his dying body after he suffers a cardiac arrest. He observes that “she has my eyes, and the maid’s body in miniature” (GW 109). It is revealed in the following chapter, entitled “Holy Mountain” that Neal’s maid does indeed give birth to a daughter, presumably fathered by Neal. Neal only enters into a sexual relationship because he has been left by Katy; therefore, the ghost of the yet-to-be-born daughter has intervened in his life in order to ensure her own birth. Temporality is entirely disrupted by the ghost girl, whether she is regarded as a mere symbol, or as a posthuman entity.

Neal’s characterisation of ghosts as necessarily relegated to the background suggests that ghostliness is not a condition of death, but rather of propinquity to him. More importantly, personhood is contingent upon being in the foreground, that is to say, in Neal’s present. This conception of personhood dissolves the continuity of the individual – the subject does not share solidarity with the past, but is remade in every passing moment. In contrast to Satoru, who chooses to build his life solely on his relationship, Neal Brose is the quintessential postmodern man, “a man of departments, compartments, apartments” (GW 103). In compartmentalising his life he defies a concept of Being as constituted holistically by past, present, and future. The omnipresence of ghosts in his life, however, reflects the traces of the past and the future. In his final moments, he ponders whether his life and identity were determined by make-or-break moments (such as letting Katy go), or whether he is the culmination of all his memories and character traits:

Or is it not a question of cause and effect, but a question of wholeness? I’m this person, I’m this person, I’m that person, I’m that person too. No wonder it’s all such a fucking mess. I divided up my possible futures, put them into separate accounts, and now they’re all spent. (GW 108) His refusal to acknowledge the temporal composition of Dasein ultimately ruins him. He does not learn from the past and lives riskily and without thought for the future. The fragmentation of Neal’s being is, in part, a symptom of the postmodern condition. In a passage reminiscent of Quasar’s attitude to late capitalism, Neal interprets advances in technology as encroaching on autonomy. The tone of his narrative is established through the regretful fusion of his body with his alarm clock:

There’s a mechanism in my alarm clock connected to a switch in my head that sends a message to my arm which extends itself and commands my thumb to punch the OFF button a moment before the thing beeps me awake. (GW 67) Prior to waking he dreams of computers, and in an allusion to Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? he wonders, “who had the first computer dream, where and when? I wonder if computers ever dream of humans” (GW 67). Neal’s reflection on the transformative power of technology is cynical. He recalls that “when [phones] first appeared, they were so cool. Only when it was too late did people realise they are as cool as electronic tags on remand prisoners” (GW 73).

Neal’s disaffection with modern living prompts him to reassess the meta-narratives of Western superiority that presumably informed his wealth-oriented lifestyle. Mitchell depicts Neal’s change of heart over the course of the chapter, evinced in his evolving attitudes to the Chinese. He initially refers to the Chinese with contempt, calling them “slitty-eyed moneymakers” and remarking that “these Chinese are fucking crazy” (GW 71, 103). At the end of the chapter he begins to acknowledge and accept complicity with the atrocities of the British Empire, outlining the history of exploitation suffered by the Hong Kong natives:

Hong Kong had been appropriated by British drug pushers in the 1840s. We wanted Chinese silk, porcelain, and spices. The Chinese didn’t want our clothes, tools, or salted herring, and who can blame them? They had no demand. Our solution was to make a demand, by getting large sections of the populace addicted to opium, a drug which the Chinese government had outlawed. When the Chinese understandably objected to this arrangement, we kicked the fuck out of them, set up a puppet government in Peking that hung signs on parks saying ‘No dogs or Chinese’, and occupied this corner of their country as an import base. Fucking godawful behaviour, when you think about it. (GW 107-8) Neal’s revelations about colonialism and his increasing disaffection with Western capitalism (and how it has regulated and compartmentalised his life) inspire him to hurl his briefcase and phone off the cliff and walk the pilgrimage up the mountain to see the statue of Buddha. Neal’s walk provides him with the space necessary for anxiety (self- reflection), prompting his reassessment of Being as holistic with time that is not compartmentalised and linear, but planetary. The association of this revelation with Eastern religion, particularly Buddhism, anticipates the cosmology of the old woman in the following chapter of the novel, entitled “Holy Mountain”.

Ghosts feature prominently in the “Holy Mountain” chapter, once again symbolising the planetary nature of Being. Mitchell volunteered in an interview that Jung Chang’s Wild Swans was a key influence on this section of the novel, which, like Chang’s controversial epic, bears witness to China’s political unrest in the twentieth century.198 A key point of similarity between Wild Swans and Ghostwritten is the narrative perspective; both novels are narrated by women, underscoring the impact of political regime and revolution on the domestic sphere. Whereas Chang’s novel traverses the mainland, the narrative of “Holy Mountain” rarely ventures from the confines of a tea shack established on the path leading up a mountain to a sacred Buddhist monastery. The old woman who narrates the fourth chapter embodies the planetary being. She is like her mountain home – deterritorialized and situated outside of history. Cultural and national orientation are irrelevant facets of identity on the Holy Mountain, hence the narrator advises the implied reader that “your left and right, your south, north, west, east, leave them at the Village. You won’t be needing them” (GW 113). The old woman is never named; she is not defined by label or language, further emphasising her situation outside of a specific culture. Time is cyclical, the mountain existing on “the prayer wheel of time” where “all the yesterdays and tomorrows spin around again sooner or later” (GW 113). The opening passage of the “Holy Mountain” chapter represents Mitchell’s first foray into second person narration, although first person is quickly resumed. The turn to second person supports the obliteration of boundaries, be they geographical, historical, or between the narrator and the reader.

198David Mitchell, “David Mitchell, The Art of Fiction No. 204”.

The old woman is visited by ghosts of her past and her future. When she was young she was raped by the Warlord’s son (who paid her father for his complicity). After this traumatic event she is visited by a spirit – an old woman. The spirit advises the young woman: “‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘The Tree will protect you. The Tree will tell you when to run, and when to hide’” (GW 117). The old woman is in fact the spirit of the narrator’s future self. At the end of the chapter, the old woman climbs into the upstairs room and sees a young girl “sleepless with fear” (GW 144). Although she does not disclose whether or not she recognises the young girl as herself, she mimics the exact speech and action of the spirit of the old woman who visited her when she was young. This scene exemplifies temporal hybridity; two moments in time collide, and the old woman interacts with, and cares for, her past self. Her words of comfort retroactively give her the strength to endure the oppression of men.

The old woman’s planetary sensibilities extend to impressions of the future. In a moment of prescience, the old woman observes a satellite:

The eye was high above. It disguised itself as a shooting star, but it didn’t fool me, for what shooting star travels in a straight line and never burns itself out? It was not a blind lens, no: it was a man’s eye, looking down at me from the cobwebbed dimness, the way they do. (GW 140-1) Her sacred Tree is surprised by her foresight, remarking that the satellite “hasn’t even been launched yet!” (GW 141). The old woman’s harmonious relationship with her past contrasts dramatically with that of her father. She is haunted by dreams of her father, and Lord Buddha explains to her that her father was “wracked with guilt, and that his soul was locked in a cage of unfinished business, down in the dim places” (GW 145). He is unable to reconcile himself with his actions that had resulted in her molestation. Like Neal Brose, he had pursued wealth to the detriment of his loved ones.

Neal Brose conceives of ghosts as being in the background, and in many ways the “Holy Mountain” chapter is a ghost story because it depicts those in the background of history. The chapter begins with the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and their eventual expulsion by the Kuomintang. During the course of her lifetime, the old woman witnesses the rise and fall of the Kuomintang (and the regional warlords), the ascendancy of the Communist party under Mao, the Cultural Revolution, and the gradual transformation of China into a capitalist culture. These seemingly radical political changes are undercut by a consistent barbarism, and the old woman remarks that she has “seen it all before” (GW 125). The narrative of the old woman deliberately challenges formal historiography by relegating details of political ideology to the periphery. These details seem unimportant given that each controlling party – from the Japanese to the communists – exhibits a similar impulse for cruelty and exploitation. Furthermore, politics (and subsequently, history) is distinguished as “the stupid world of men” (GW 133). After the old woman’s tea shack is wrecked by the Japanese and then again by the Kuomintang, she observes that “always, it is the poor people who pay. And always, it is the poor people’s women who pay the most” (GW 126). The old woman is the first of a series of sage-like figures revered in Mitchell’s novels. She is a precursor to Otane the Healer from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and Esther Little from The Bone Clocks. These women are distinguished by their intimacy with the land and a sense of planetary time. The old woman’s perspective contextualises narratives of History within planetary history. Her story not only reasserts the narratives of women, the narratives of East, but the narrative of the planetary.

The transformation of China under late capitalism is as (if not more) destructive than the series of political upheavals that preceded it. The old woman finally participates in the pilgrimage to the summit of the Holy Mountain, only to discover that she has “stumbled into a future lifetime” (GW 146). The summit of the mountain has been urbanised, the once sacred monastery now denigrated to the status of tourist destination. A consequence of the postmodern condition is the rejection of metanarratives of the sacred (or any certitude of a sacred). The old woman identifies this loss as symptomatic of late capitalism. The mountain is no longer holy (excepting her Tree) and under the spread of urbanisation “the holy places were having to hide deeper, and higher” (GW 149). The “Holy Mountain” narrative depicts the spread of urbanisation as an erasure of the numinous qualities of the environment. It is a space no longer hospitable to “planetary becoming” because it has been homogenised by the flows of late capital, which in turn induces the crisis of cognitive mapping.

The “Mongolia” chapter, which follows, engages with the specificity of Being.199 It is narrated from the perspective of a ghost, the self-titled “noncorpum”. It is revealed that the noncorpum is in fact the voice of the Sacred Tree from the “Holy Mountain”

199 This particular chapter informed much of Boulter’s analysis of the posthuman in Ghostwritten. chapter. A visitor at the tea shack tells a story about “three animals who think about the fate of the world” (GW 143). This has personal resonance for the noncorpum, which is on a quest to discover the origins of the story, believing it will reveal information about his own identity.200 This quest takes him to Mongolia.

The noncorpum does not define himself in the initial passages of the “Mongolia” chapter. The narrative progresses from an uncomplicated, third-person indirect discourse, focalising on the character of the Danish backpacker Caspar, assuming his thought: “Caspar was feeling lonely and homesick” (GW 155). First person narration begins without clear designation of the identity of the “I”, who declares that Mongolia is “a far-flung, trackless country in which to hunt myself” (GW 155). The noncorpum recounts his incipient moments of awareness as a “dimness” spent “at the foot of the Holy Mountain” (GW 158). He likens his own gradual consciousness to that of a bird, which (through affect, rather than thought) realises its own distinction (“I”) from its shell (“It”) (GW 158). He describes the emergence into Being-in-the-world, “out and alone in the vertiginous world, made of wonder, and fear, and colours, made of unknown things” (GW 158). The noncorpum’s sense of Being-in-the-world is distinct from the bird’s by virtue of solitariness. His sense of self is marred by persistent self- questioning: “Why am I alone?” (GW 158). He affirms Heidegger’s privileging of Being over thought through his description of human minds. The noncorpum uses sensory language to explain the nature (and uniqueness) of every human mind. The mind “pulses”; “some are lukewarm, some are hot. Some flare out, some are very nearly not there. Some stay on the fringe, like quasars” (GW 160). Contrary to the isolation of Heidegger’s subject, the noncorpum’s burgeoning awareness is accompanied by the shock that he shares his existence with another, whom he regards as a kind of intruder – “I thought the mind of my first host was the cuckoo’s egg, that would hatch and drive me out” (GW 162). He puts his host into a coma, and transmigrates into a doctor, thus beginning his quest of self-discovery.

The noncorpum is defined by this quest, by “searching for something to search for”. Jonathon Boulter’s assertion that the noncorpum is spatially defined is supported by the posthuman entity’s reflection upon backpackers: “We live nowhere, we are strangers

200 The noncorpum eventually discovers that he was a boy in his former human life, but throughout the chapter he is gender-neutral. I have opted to refer to the noncorpum with the pronoun “he” for the sake of convenience, but as a posthuman entity he is better understood as post-gender. everywhere. We drift, often on a whim, searching for something to search for” (GW 160). The identification with backpackers would suggest that spatial definition is not exclusive to the posthuman, but finds its trace in humanity. This trace is apparent in the noncorpum’s accounts of the mental landscapes of different humans. He describes the mind through spatial imagery: memories are “tunnels [that] lead to tunnels, deeper down”, and “many minds redirect memories along revised maps” (GW 175). When the noncorpum transmigrates from Caspar to Gunga, a Mongolian woman, it is like travelling to a different part of the world:

It was good to transmigrate out of a westernised head. However much I learn from the non-stop highways of minds like Caspar’s, they make me giddy. It would be the euro’s exchange rate one minute, a film he’d once seen about art thieves in Petersburg the next, a memory of fishing with his uncle between islets the next, some pop song or a friend’s internet home page the next. No stopping. (GW 166) The noncorpum’s account of Caspar’s mind reflects the state of the individual in the era of late capitalism – refracted by information overload. It is a “sprawling conurbation”, rather than the unchanging (and consequently more coherent) “village” of Gunga’s third-world mind (GW 166).

The emphasis on spatial definition, rather than temporally “Being-towards-death”, is necessitated by the noncorpum’s status as ghost – he cannot be defined by a relation to death as he is immortal. His quest to discover himself, however, belies his desire to be human, a condition of which is Being-towards-death. The noncorpum’s journey is motivated by the fact that “I have never found the source of the story I was born with, and I have never discovered whether others of my kind exist” (GW 172). The story that he is born with, “the three who think about the fate of the world”, is an illustration of existence as being defined by Being-towards-death. The “three” – a crane, a locust, and a bat – are perpetually aware of impending doom and they behave accordingly. The crane steps gently so as not to cause a landslide, the locust watches the water in fear of a deluge, and the bat flies up and down to ensure that the sky has not fallen. Animal nature is defined eschatologically in this tale, and it is no coincidence that the quest for the noncorpum’s origins (his humanity) is inextricably linked with a narrative that defines being in relation to death. If the noncorpum’s return to humanity is a return to the state of Being-towards-death, then it is also a resumption of temporal definition. The noncorpum is eventually given the choice permanently to transmigrate into a baby who has been born without a soul, and thus become human again. Serendipitously, the noncorpum is reunited with the memories of his former human life (up until the moment at which he was executed by the Japanese), prior to returning to a human form. He enters into the mind of an old Mongolian woman, remarking that “I found something I had never seen in any human mind: a canyon of another’s memories, running across her mind. I saw it straight away, like a satellite passing over. I entered it, and as I did so I entered my own past” (GW 199). The notion that Dasein is its past is reinforced by the noncorpum’s active re-entering into his past (which is not chronologically distinct from the present or the future). Furthermore, the discovery of his identity is achieved not merely through recapturing his past, but witnessing his own death.

Another condition of the noncorpum’s posthumanity is that he is in a constant state of Heideggerian anxiety. He cannot sleep or dream, and he does not forget; he is “trapped in one waking state of consciousness” (GW 172). Although he thereby represents Heidegger’s authentic being, his inability to be inauthentic detracts from his sense of humanity. He is not capable of Being-in-the-world; as “a parasite, I could experience all of these, second-hand, but I could never be of these” (GW 193). In a point of departure from Heidegger, the noncorpum’s experience of human minds problematizes the conceptualisation of the Being as a discrete entity. In the first instance, the noncorpum’s sentience does not predate his memory of the story of the three who think about the fate of the world - “the story that was already there, right at the beginning of ‘I’, sixty years ago” (GW 164). Just as Mongolian folk tales are interwoven throughout the noncorpum’s narrative, so they are intrinsic to the understanding of his own identity. Furthermore, even the noncorpum doubts his own isolation: “How do I know that there aren’t noncorpi living within me, controlling my actions? Like a virus within a bacteria? Surely I would know. But that’s exactly what humans think” (GW 191). This seed of doubt about his own consciousness is undoubtedly postmodern. The noncorpum questions his capacity ever to authenticate any metanarrative of Being he might discover. Unsurprisingly, the noncorpum conceives of the mind-as-author, observing that “most humans are constantly writing in their heads, editing their conversations and mixing images and telling themselves jokes or replaying music” (GW 181). One of his hosts, Suhbataar, who is a Mongolian government agent and a sociopath, evinces his lack of humanity through his atypically barren mental landscape, which is bereft of a narrative stream of consciousness. The noncorpum is an effective model for illustrating the components of Dasein: he evinces the traces of spatial definition, being-towards- death, and the inclination towards producing narratives as a way of making sense of existence

The fifth chapter of the novel, “Petersburg”, illustrates the oppressive force of metanarratives of truth and morality, with specific relation to Christianity. Christianity is implicated in this story as part of a wider social movement that objectifies and limits the roles of women. The chapter revisits the marginalised female perspective on politics first explored in the “Holy Mountain” chapter. The protagonist, Margarita Letunsky, is a beautiful Russian woman involved in a plot to steal famous works of art.201 As Margarita’s personal history is disclosed throughout the narrative it is revealed that she has been repeatedly mistreated by men, from her father who refuses to acknowledge her as his illegitimate child, her lover who forces her to have an abortion and then abandons her (for his political aspirations), and her current lover Rudi, who prostitutes her in aid of his criminal enterprises. Although Margarita recognises that “a weapon men use against women is the refusal to take them seriously”, she is socially conditioned to define herself according to her desirability to men (GW 261). She reflects upon aged women, and expresses the hope that “Rudi will put me to sleep before I get to that point” (GW 250). Margarita thus thinks of herself as a pet, as a companion animal and possession belonging to Rudi that he may “put […] to sleep” when she no longer serves his purpose.

Margarita accepts her role as a lesser being, and convinces herself that she is “not a political woman”, yet she ruminates on the condition of the Russian people under Soviet and democratic rule (GW 213). In a similar vein to the old woman of the Holy Mountain, Margarita observes little critical difference between alternative systems of government. She concludes that

No nothing’s changed. You used to pay off your local Party thug, now you pay off your local mafia thug. The old Party used to lie, and lie, and lie some more. Now our democratically elected government lies, and lies, and lies some more” (GW213). This reverie articulates the theme of predation and exploitation that recurs throughout Mitchell’s fiction. Margarita believes that “everything is about wanting. Everything.

201 Caspar dreams of a film about Russian art thieves in “Mongolia”. In some ways this anticipates the “text within a text” pattern of Cloud Atlas. Things happen because of people wanting” (GW 213). Margarita’s preoccupation with desire derives from her past as a Christian – a moralising metanarrative that she cannot fully relinquish. The motif of desire recurs throughout the chapter in the form of Delacroix’s Eve and the Serpent, a painting which Margarita, Rudi and the forger Jerome intend to steal. Margarita works as a gallery attendant and she is stationed in a room where the Delacroix hangs. Consequently, her narrative involves extensive ekphrastic passages in which the exchange between Eve and the serpent is imagined. Margarita imagines the serpent affirming her belief that not “forbidden knowledge” but the desire it engenders was the dangerous or sinful quality of the fruit of the tree (GW 208-9).

Margarita is incapable of entering an authentic state of Being because her moments of anxiety are entirely governed by Christian narratives of sin. Her faith resurfaces in moments of fear, often in the figure (or voice) of the serpent. When she discovers her murdered cat her inner dialogue is interjected with the perspective of the serpent: “What do I do? What do you always do? ‘Ask your desire!’ orders the serpent” (GW 255). She is unable to contain a threatening thought, which she visualises as follows:

An awful form was floating down the Neva from the marshes. Lazily, on its back, until it reached Alexandra Nevskogo Bridge. It would crawl up a support, and haul its stumps and teeth through the streets, looking for me. (GW 255) She does not name the “awful form”, but it is apparent that it exists in her mind: “I shoved whatever it was that I mustn’t think about back upstream, but it kept floating down” (GW 256). The suggestion that Margarita’s mental landscape is not unique or authentic is reinforced by her dream, which resembles Quasar’s dream in “Okinawa”. In her dream, Margarita observes a man (Quasar) and a woman running, the man holding her arm and wanting to “save the woman from the evil” lurking in the tunnel (GW 239). In the first chapter, Quasar describes this scene himself, noting the presence of “a foreign woman on a hill, watching a wooden pole sinking into the ground” (GW 20). The wooden pole, in Margarita’s dream, is the crucifix, and as it sinks into the ground she realises that the face of Jesus is “a grinning devil” and that “Christianity had been one horrible, sick, two-thousand-year-old joke” (GW 239). This is the closest Margarita comes to recognising how she is conditioned and controlled by metanarratives, but she is never able to transcend her conditioning. For example, Margarita recalls conceding to her lover’s demand that she have an abortion, despite her fear that “there was a gulag in hell for women who killed their babies” (GW 256). The botched abortion renders her infertile, with significant effect upon her identity. Margarita frequently expresses her desire for children (in conjunction with fears of her waning attractiveness). Her rationale for participating in the heist is to escape to Switzerland in the hope that the waters there will restore her fertility. She projects her longing to be a mother onto her younger lover, who “brings out a maternal streak” (GW 245). Her desire for children and her possessiveness of Rudi reflect her co-dependent character – she is only valuable if others (usually men) deem her so.

Margarita is incapable of accepting advice from women, to her detriment. She dreams of Catherine the Great, an exemplar of female power in a patriarchal society, who warns her of impending doom:

Heaven only knows, in this world a woman has to take opportunity by the horns whenever it comes calling, but we are warning you. Plots are being hatched in the palace. The time has come to cut and run. If you take another picture, the price will be pain and anguish beyond your imaginings. (GW 244) Margarita ignores the dream and persists in helping Rudi steal the artworks (which are mere commodities in his mind). She dismisses the proposition that traditional gender roles need not govern her after her infertility is confirmed: “some iron cow of a counsellor [. . .] said it was an old bourgeois conceit that dictated the only role in life for women was to provide for capitalists to exploit, but I told her I didn’t need her advice and I walked out” (GW 237). Margarita is ultimately betrayed by Rudi and murdered by Subhataar as a consequence of her involvement in the art heist. Unlike the old woman on the Holy Mountain, Margarita represents the women throughout history who cannot escape the totalising control of heteronormative metanarratives of gender and the patriarchy.

The dynamics of chance and fate are contemplated in the following chapter, “London”. Marco, a professional ghost-writer and band-member of “The Music of Chance”, presents the “Marco Chance versus Fate Video Sports Match Analogy” (GW 292).202

It goes like this: when the players are out there the game is a sealed arena of interbombarding chance. But when the game is on video then every tiniest action already exists. The past, present, and

202 Marco’s band name is a reference to Paul Auster’s crime novel, entitled The Music of Chance, which similarly explores the dynamics of chance. future exist at the same time: all the tape is there, in your hand. There can be no chance, for every human decision and random fall of the ball is already fated. Therefore, does fate or chance control our lives? Well, the answer is as relative as time. If you’re in your life, chance. Viewed from the outside, like a book you’re reading, it’s fate all the way. (GW 292) The seeming supremacy of either fate or chance is dependent upon perspective, and Ghostwritten provides a planetary perspective on the matter to interesting effect. Sarah Dillon has offered a compelling account of causality in Ghostwritten, with reference to Ilya Prigogene’s account of chaos theory.203 Dillon’s argument (to summarise at the risk of simplifying) is that the world is a system comprised of sub-systems susceptible to fluctuations, which can eventually drive the system to a “bifurcation point” at which the system progresses randomly to a higher order. In Dillon’s assessment, these points “demonstrate the simultaneous and interconnected operation of both determinism and chance”.204 The achievement of Ghostwritten is its depiction of this planetary system and its fluctuating (often competing), peculiar parts. It is important to note that Dillon has argued that Ghostwritten is not a postmodern novel, and certainly the scope of the novel marks a departure from traditional postmodern constructs.205 The dominant social system in the novel is that of late capitalism, and – as previously indicated – it is the aim of this chapter to demonstrate the novel’s sustained concern with the effects of postmodern culture on Being. Marco, for example, conveys the postmodern compartmentalisation of self when he opines that “the Morning After Me was not overly impressed with the Night Before Me. I pass through many Mes in the course of the day, each one selfish with his time” (GW 270). The multi-perspectival mode of Ghostwritten and the way the various narrators are tangentially linked to each other creates the planetary scope (the vision of a world system) of the novel. Conversely, the many perspectives of the narrators ensure that no narrative of the world is left uncontested, and the reader concludes each story without a conventional sense of closure. The novel envisions the world-system and its fluctuations, and in my view (one which I will expand upon later in the chapter) Mitchell presents a deep concern with how capitalist culture is pushing the global populations to an apocalyptic bifurcation point.

203 Sarah Dillon, “Chaotic Narrative: Complexity, Causality, Time, and Autopoiesis in David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten”, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 52, no. 2 (2011), 144. 204 Ibid. 205 Dillon states in a footnote that she disagrees with Philip Griffith’s characterisation of Ghostwritten as a postmodern novel, Ibid., 159. The “London” chapter invokes the image of ghosts in much the same way as the “Holy Mountain” and “Hong Kong” chapters, yet the metaphor is extended to the concept of ghost-writing, or the construction of self. The terms “ghostwriter” and “ghostwritten” are invoked in numerous instances (with different entendres) within the “London” chapter. Marco is literally ghostwriting the autobiography of a former British spy, Alfred Kopf. Kopf’s life story, however, involves a ghost, specifically his own ghost. He relates to Marco his experience of having seen himself, “not a reflection, not a lookalike, not a twin brother, not a spiritual awakening, not a waxwork. This is no cheap riddle. I saw myself, Alfred Kopf, large as life” (GW 285). Kopf chases his own ghost around London, only to arrive back at the same point where he had first seen himself (and his double disappears). It is implied that Kopf is caught in a loop of time – he chases himself, chasing himself. The past, present, and future exist at the same moment. Kopf confesses that he (and others who have encountered themselves) felt an overpowering desire to “jump up and chase after the interloper and stamp him into the ground” (GW 286). This impulse demonstrates an aversion to what is perceived to be a challenge to individuality and a discrete sense of subject. It could also be interpreted as distaste for the self “viewed from the outside”, to borrow Marco’s phrase. That is to say, Kopf is discomfited by seeing himself located in time and thus governed by fate.

Marco’s publisher, Timothy Cavendish, conceives of Being itself as ghostwriting. Dasein is constituted by its past, but Cavendish distinguishes between the actual and the virtual past (in other words, the historical past and the memory of the past). Cavendish declares to Marco that “the act of memory is an act of ghostwriting” (GW 295). Memories of the past are thus moments that are woven into narratives produced by the subject in order to create sense and coherence. The publisher continues, arguing that “we’re all ghostwriters, my boy. And it’s not just our memories. Our actions, too. We all think we’re in control of our own lives, but really they’re pre-ghostwritten by forces around us” (GW 295-6). Cavendish could be referring to either fate or chance when he cites “forces” that are “pre-ghostwriting” human lives. In any case, he is suggesting that the subject is not in control of their lives, actions, or identities, and that any sense of the “ownmost” self is an artificial metanarrative constructed by the individual to maintain an illusion of control.

The “London” chapter anticipates several key elements in Mitchell’s third novel, Cloud Atlas. Timothy Cavendish, Marco’s cynical publisher, is a central character in Cloud Atlas. Katy Forbes has a “birthmark shaped like a comet”, which is a symbol of interconnection in Cloud Atlas (and some have argued that it is an indicator that the main characters are reincarnations of the same soul, although this is problematic as Timothy possesses the birthmark and he and Katy are alive at the same time) (GW 305). The “London” chapter also introduces the central theme reprised in Cloud Atlas – that the history and future of humanity are governed by the human will to power. When Marco is in a casino, he is advised by Kemal (an acquaintance) not to “overrate chance” because “winning in a casino is like winning in life: all is a matter of will” (GW 310). Cloud Atlas depicts the cycle of exploitation at numerous stages in history (and in the future), and the question of whether or not utopia can be achieved is explicitly raised at the conclusion of that novel. In other words, is it a matter of will (as Kemal proposes), or is humanity part of a system with set patterns of behaviour that cannot be transcended? Dillon’s application of chaos theory illuminates both novels’ positions on the topic of utopia. The overwhelming pressure of a dominant system of power makes it difficult to create positive change; however, certain fluctuations can lead to a transformation of that system, therefore the individual still retains the moral agency to contribute to programs of reform. As Dillon observes in her analysis of the “London” chapter: “[…] love is perhaps the most powerful fluctuation capable of promoting self- reorganization to a higher level of complexity in a system”.206 Marco ultimately chooses to abandon his promiscuous, spontaneous lifestyle and recommits to Poppy – the mother of his child – in the hope of a more fulfilling life.

In what could be considered a self-reflexive moment in the novel, Marco reflects upon narrative endings: “I couldn’t get to sleep afterwards, worrying about the possible endings of the stories that had been started. Maybe that’s why I’m a ghostwriter. The endings have nothing to do with me” (GW 279) Ghostwritten is a novel without an ending. Every narrative concludes without offering a definitive ending to the characters’ exploits. The final chapter of the novel, entitled “Underground”, returns to the Tokyo subway, detailing Quasar’s state of mind just before he releases the sarin gas. Ghostwritten itself therefore ends moments before the narrative beginning of its opening chapter. Thus the novel can be read circuitously, without end.

206 Sarah Dillon, “Chaotic Narrative: Complexity, Causality, Time, and Autopoiesis in David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten”, 145. The “Clear Island” chapter examines temporality and being through the lens of quantum physics. The protagonist of this chapter is Mo Muntervary, a scientist who first appears in the “Mongolia” chapter on the Trans-Siberian railway, then briefly again in the “London” chapter. Mo is originally from Clear Island, which is located off the South Coast of Ireland, and the chapter recounts her brief return to her hometown. Although Mo is a scientist, she accepts science (or at least, physics) as being a narrative construct. She cites Niels Bohr and reflects on epistemology in general:

Niels Bohr, the great Dane of Quantum Physics, was fond of saying: ‘It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.’ The double-crossed, might-have-been history of my country is not the study of what actually took place here: it’s the study of historians’ studies. Historians have their axes to grind, just as physicists do. Memories are their own descendants masquerading as the ancestors of the present. (GW 326) The descendant/ancestor metaphor complicates Dasein as the “ownmost” self, as it separates the actual lived past from the virtual past. In the “London” chapter, Marco jokes about the clichéd rhetoric of “quantum physics equals eastern religion bollocks” (GW 267). Mo’s expert understanding of physics does in fact reinforce the resonances between eastern conceptions of time and quantum physics. While Mo is in the process of creating a sentient program, she observes a gecko on the screen, and facetiously addresses it:

Hello, tiny life-form of star compost, did you know that your lizardly life, too, is billiarded this way and that by quantum scissors, papers and stones? That your particles exist in a time-froth of little bridges and holes forever going back and around and under itself? That the universe is the shape of a doughnut, and that if you had a powerful enough telescope you would see the top of your tail? (GW 347) Time, as it is described by physics, is cyclical, just as it is conceived of by the old woman in the “Holy Mountain” chapter. Mo posits that measurements of time, however, are artificial, imposed upon human life by technology and the processes of capitalism:

Even time is not immune to time. Once the only times that mattered were the rhythms of the planet and the body. The first people on this island needed time four times a year: the solstices and the equinoxes, to avoid planting seed too early or too late. When the Church got here, it staked out Sundays, Christmases, Easter, and began colonising the year with Saints’ Days. The English brought short leases and tax deadlines. With the railway, the hours had to march in time. Now TV satellites beam the same 6 o’clock news everywhere at the same 6 o’clock. Science has been busy splicing time into ever thinner slivers as it has matter. (GW 365) The regulation of time simultaneously homogenises space (the “same 6 o’clock news everywhere”) while “splicing” and fragmenting the days and years according to capitalist schedules such as “tax deadlines”. The compartmentalisation of time and space produces the illusion of separation and individuality, yet Mo observes that “nowhere does the microscopic world stop and the macroscopic world begin” (GW 373). Mo’s appreciation for the interconnectivity that defines life and the world motivates her to create Quancog – an artificial intelligence. Quancog was commissioned for military purposes, yet Mo builds into the software a pacifistic agenda to prevent nations from attacking each other with weapons systems.

Mo is antipathetic towards late capitalism, expressing distaste for urbanisation and the hyperrealism of postmodern culture. She identifies the relationship between space and being, asking herself: “what is it that ties shapes of land to the human heart […]?” (GW 321). The urban landscape, however, does not conjure the same intimacy and harmony as Clear Island – her rustic Irish home. She jokingly refers to “Smug Zurich and Euromoney Geneva and Pell Mell Hong Kong and Merciless Beijing and Damned London” (GW 322). Just as women are “unexplored continents” to Marco, she is able to “close [her] eyes and see [Clear Island’s] topography, like [she] could see John’s body” (GW 322). Clear Island is technologically behind the rest of the world, untouched by the capitalism of somewhere such as Hong Kong where (echoing Satoru) she asserts that you “learn to do inside your head what you can’t do outside” (GW 341).

The dominance of the hyperreal in the postmodern era has sinister consequences in the field of war. John, Mo’s husband, echoes Baudrillard’s critique of postmodern warfare after watching a news report on “Homer Technology”, which is purported to “revolutionise warfare” in order to attack “evil dictators” with “minimal collateral damage” (GW 323). John retorts that “This isn’t news, it’s sports coverage. Have so many films been made about hi-tech war that hi-tech war is now a film? It’s product placement” (GW 323). Huw, a friend of Mo, reinforces John’s critique, arguing that pre-emptive strike “must mean not declaring war until your cameras are in position” (GW 324). The war itself is hyperreal.207 It is produced for the simulacrum (television) and it is conducted according to the principles of the simulacrum, in this instance, according to the tropes of blockbuster films. In the words of a General (and incidentally, Mo’s boss) “The New World Order is Old Hat. War is making a major comeback – not that it had ever gone anywhere” (GW 331). Even to its practitioners, war has been transformed into entertainment in the era of late capitalism. It is, in Mo’s estimation, “television war” (GW 341).

The television war reaches its zenith in the ninth chapter entitled “Night Train”, which is set in New York. The world-system seemingly reaches a pivotal moment – a bifurcation point – that will determine the future of humanity, and the possibility of utopia becomes a focal point of discussion. The “Night Train” is a late night radio show hosted by Bat Segundo. The moniker “Bat” alludes to the tale of “the three who think about the fate of the world” in the “Mongolia” chapter. As previously mentioned, the bat in the tale flies up and down, making sure that the sky is not falling. In “Night Train”, Bat Segundo continues to broadcast and report on “Brink Day”, a nuclear missile crisis between the US and unnamed international “foes”, referring to his show as “the End of the World Special” (GW 403).

The broadcast is interrupted by a mysterious caller who calls itself “the Zookeeper”, and is revealed to be the creation of Mo Muntervary. Zookeeper is the culmination of “quantum cognition”; it is the ultimate “posthuman”. It is gender-neutral, and “cannot fabulate” (GW 387). The title “Zookeeper” evokes Mo’s comment on a news broadcast of an unnamed war in the previous chapter: “My, it is a sick zoo we’ve turned the world into” (GW 324). The Zookeeper was designed by Mo Muntervary to prevent humans from abusing technology. It operates according to four laws: the Zookeeper must be accountable for all its actions; it must remain invisible to humans (who are referred to as both “primates” and “visitors”); it must conserve the planet; and it must preserve human life. Originally, the Zookeeper was programmed to believe that “adherence to the four laws would discern the origins of order” (GW 426). The Zookeeper’s rationale for contacting the “Night Train” show derives from the difficulty of reconciling the four

207 Mitchell never identifies which war John, Mo and Hew are discussing. Historically speaking they could be referring to the Bosnian War, but the description of media coverage would imply that they are talking about a conflict more akin to the Gulf War (which does not correspond with the timeline of the novel). It is arguable that the war is left nameless so that the discussion functions as a critique of all postmodern warfare. laws. The posthuman is ultimately incapable of creating a utopia while obeying the four laws:

I believed I could do much. I stabilised stock markets; but economic surplus was used to fuel arms races. I provided alternative energy solutions; but the researchers sold them to oil cartels who sit on them. I froze nuclear weapons systems; but war multiplied, waged with machine guns, scythes and pick-axes. (GW 425) Zookeeper appeals to Bat for advice, offering a thought experiment which places two principles – the desire to preserve life and the desire to acquire wealth – in opposition to each other. Bat concedes that there can be no satisfactory outcome because “laws may help you hack through the jungle, but no law changes the fact you’re in a jungle. I don’t think there is a law of laws” (GW 389). The Zookeeper concludes that the fourth law (to preserve human life) is preventing it from ensuring the stability of the planet as “the zoo is in pandemonium. It’s worse than when I started” (GW 413). After consultation with Bat (who does not comprehend what the Zookeeper is, or what it is referring to), the Zookeeper is convinced to “ditch” the fourth law (GW 428). The Zookeeper’s dilemma could suggest that Ghostwritten is an anti-utopian work, a sub-genre which Jameson argues is characterised by “the way in which [it is] informed by a central passion to denounce and to warn against Utopian programs in the political realm”.208 In my view, the Zookeeper’s approach to creating a utopia is critically flawed because it operates on a paternalistic basis. The satellite that the old woman intuits in the “Mongolia” chapter is part of the Zookeeper’s regime, and is characterised by the male gaze (hence she describes it as “a man’s eye, looking down at me from the cobwebbed dimness, the way they do” (GW 140-1)). The Zookeeper creates a panoptical system of surveillance, manipulating humanity whilst remaining invisible. This kind of utopia – one maintained through the dissemination of power via surveillance – is doomed to fail because it does not engage with the nature of Being. The nine protagonists of Ghostwritten express a need to belong, to situate themselves in space, time, and community in order to feel self-coherence, whereas the Zookeeper persists in operating within the confines of the late capitalist system – “the jungle” – rather than contemplating the creation of a new social order.

208 Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, (London: Verso, 2005), 198-199. A second intruder interrupts the “Night Train” broadcast to lecture the Zookeeper on its failure to grasp the pointlessness of trying to create utopia in a late capitalist world. This intruder, named Arupadhatu, claims to have seen “the inside” of Mo Muntervary’s head, and chastises the Zookeeper for believing itself to be unique: “Does it hurt, Zookeeper, to have your omniscience lose its omni? How could a being with your resources believe yourself to be the only non-corporeal sentient intelligence wandering the surface of creation?” (GW 422). Arupadhatu is another noncorpum, who implies that he possessed Mo Muntervary on a brief occasion. A self-described “fallen angel”, Arupadhatu claims responsibility for inspiring the (surprisingly accurate) apocalyptic prophecies of His Serendipity, the cult leader of the Fellowship. Arupadhatu critiques other noncorpa for “[transmigrating] into human chaff for hosts, and [meditating] upon nothingness upon mountains” (GW 422). This noncorpum alludes to other beings like himself, anticipating the central narrative of Mitchell’s sixth novel, The Bone Clocks, in which beings (Anchorites and Atemporals) are pitted against each other to determine the fate of humanity. Arupadhatu believes in the supremacy of his incorporeal existence, declaring that “the stones, shrines and image-optic idols [which humans] worship are as vacant as the worshippers” (GW 423). He proposes a despotic alliance with the Zookeeper as “the children” – that is to say, humans – “need taking in hand” and “together, we are what they have always yearned for” (GW 423). The Zookeeper considers the proposition, yet opts instead to silence Arupadhatu. Arupadhatu’s egomaniacal proposition is based on his assessment of humanity as being deceived and controlled by the hyperreal. He delivers a powerful critique of hyperrealism in the era of late capitalism:

“You fanfare your “Information Revolution”, your e-mail, v-mail, you vid-cons! As if information itself is thought! You have no idea what you’ve made! You are all lap-dogs, believing your collars to be haloes! Information is control. Everything you think you know, every image on every screen, every word on every phone, every digit on every VDU, who do you think has got their hands on it before it gets to you? Comet Aloysius could be on a collision course with the Grand Central Station, and unless your star guest here chose to let the instruments he controls tell your scientists, you wouldn’t know a thing until you woke up one morning to find no sun and a winter of five hundred years! You wouldn’t recognise the end of the world if it flew up your nose and died there!” (GW 423) The Zookeeper is less susceptible to the hyperreal than the human, but at a cost. The program’s inability to produce stories situates it outside the experience of humanity, particularly if one subscribes to the idea put forward by the recurring character, Luisa Rey, that “The human world is made of stories, not people. The people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed” (GW 386). Luisa appears to be endorsing the postmodern incredulity to metanarratives, which oppress and enslave people by indoctrinating them into a constrictive and false line of thought. Boulter argues that the Zookeeper’s insistence on ethical laws (inscribed by Mo Muntervary) demonstrates that it is not entirely posthuman as its sense of Dasein derives from the past. That is to say, the Zookeeper’s laws reflect its human provenance. In the words of Boulter: “[…] given the insistence on the ethical constraints that will define (if not delimit) The Zookeeper, the posthuman still maintains itself, and still will maintain itself, as always bearing the traces of what we imagine to be the better part of humanity: ethics”.209 Nevertheless, the Zookeeper is excluded from the aspects of Being (including the force of love) that need to be mobilised in order that the social-system be elevated to a higher order.

The Zookeeper’s failure to create utopia establishes Mitchell’s somewhat cynical vision of the history and fate of civilisation. “Brink Day” illustrates the capacity of humans to act in self-interest and to demonise other humans as a means of self-validation. Bat showcases excerpts of political speeches addressing “Brink Day” from around the world. The Americans frame the situation as a threat to the “pillars of democracy, decency and freedom” (GW 408). A leader from an unnamed country (presumably from the Middle East, given the politically loaded language) objects to his people being characterised by the US as “terrorists” and “extremists”, citing collateral damage and stolen oil, minerals and fish as justification for retaliation (GW 408). Another leader (possibly from the African continent) promotes economic resistance – a default on all loans – as “for centuries the West has bound us in chains” and “when iron shackles became too embarrassing for their sensibilities, they replaced them with chains of debt” (GW 408). These opposing metanarratives of truth, of good and evil, cannot be transcended by the human or the posthuman.

The final chapter of the novel is titled “Underground” (in an evident allusion to Murakami’s monograph) and depicts Quasar on a train and about to release the sarin gas. He is confronted by symbols of every preceding narrative – an ad for the Bat Segundo show, a bottle of Kilmagoon depicting an Irish island, a tourist pamphlet for St

209 Jonathon Boulter, “Posthuman Temporality: David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten”, 29-30. Petersburg and so on. The signified stories are parts of a chaotic chain of reaction instigated by Quasar’s actions on the train. The novel is structured so that these narratives feature within the frame of Quasar’s story, and the scene is a metafictional reference to the idea that Quasar’s deeds effect such reverberations. He exhorts himself to “Move! The unclean are dazzling you! Empty your self of self, and you may slip [through] where even a scream could not” (GW 435). Quasar’s sense of alienation does not remove him from the world-system, and by juxtaposing his story with “Brink Day” Mitchell is illustrating the potential of the individual (not just nations and large entities) to produce fluctuations that alter the system. (As alluded to earlier, Murakami identified the sarin gas attacks as the beginning of a new era in Japan). The novel concludes by repeating the opening line of the first chapter (a phrase that recurs throughout the text): “Who is blowing on the nape of my neck?” (GW 436). Quasar turns to see nothing, but the sensation implies a ghostly presence.

Ghostwritten does not articulate its own version of utopia. Rather, the planetary scope of the novel illustrates how the individual is not a separate entity, but permanently and meaningfully implicated in the web of life. The “web” itself is that of late capitalism, and the many narrators engage with the nature of Being in this context. The novel is dialectical, simultaneously affirming the postmodern critique of totalising metanarratives that oppress the individual while depicting the detrimental impact of the crisis of cognitive mapping. Implicit in the critique of late capitalism is the novel’s stance on Being as planetary. Dasein is constituted by space as much as by time and there is a common desire for belonging among the protagonists; that is, the desire to situate oneself spatially and in relation to others. The environment is consequently elevated in the novel from the status of resource to a being in its own right, as well as a critical influence on human identity. As a planetary postmodern novel, Ghostwritten takes life in postmodern culture as its subject but re-contextualises (without homogenising) the individual as a planetary being who is a part of a planetary network. The metafictional title, Ghostwritten, encapsulates the complexity of the novel’s engagement with Being. The ghosts in the novel range from symbols of the past and the future, to the very forces of fate and chance that seemingly determine – write, if you will – the lives of the characters. The novel is foundational not only because it exhibits the aesthetic style that has come to be associated with Mitchell, but because it raises the significant questions of identity, agency, and utopia that are revisited throughout the remainder of his oeuvre.

Number9dream: Hyperrealism and Locating the “Real Eiji Miyake”

“The truth glows in burning jade on my memory’s retina” - Eiji210

The fusion of postmodernism and the planetary that animates the work of David Mitchell is exemplified in a scene from number9dream, in which the protagonist Eiji Miyake encounters a literal world of literature:

I emerge into a library/study with the highest book population density I have ever come across. Book walls, book towers, book avenues, book side streets. Book spillages, book rubble. Paperback books, hardback books, atlases, manuals, almanacs. Nine lifetimes of books. Enough books to build an igloo to hide in. The room is sentient with books. Mirrors double and cube the books. A Great Wall of China quantity of books. Enough books to make me wonder if I am a book too (ND 210). The study serves as a microcosm of the postmodern world, complete with the unnavigable cityscape of late capitalism, its walls, towers, avenues, and side streets. The overwhelming infrastructure of this world is artificially constructed; it is a self- conscious, sentient assemblage of humanly-contrived ideas and narratives, too plentiful ever to be quantified and comprehended. It is a transient world, nevertheless, and there is an implicit threat to its own environs through the unchecked spillages and rubble. The impact of this printed-word world on the individual is disorientating. The sheer mass of books, undifferentiable from its doubled and cubed reflection, prompts Eiji to doubt his own identity and wonder if he is, in fact, a literary construct. This is rather ironic, as the reader is fully aware that Eiji is indeed a construct within a book. Thus, through a succinct, imagistic passage, Mitchell encapsulates the philosophy and scope of number9dream, and arguably also his entire oeuvre. number9dream explores conceptualisations of the individual, the social, and the environment under late capitalism, and how these conceptualisations are inevitably mediated by the hyperreal. The basis for this exploration is the narrative of Eiji, a young Japanese man who travels to Tokyo in order to discover the identity of the father he has never met. The novel, which has been described by Kathryn Simpson as a “postmodern Bildungsroman”, does

210 David Mitchell, number9dream, (London: Sceptre, 2001), 411. Further references to this edition will be included in the text in parentheses with the acronym “ND”. not explore merely Eiji’s nominal quest, but also his journey of self-discovery.211 Eiji’s attempts to identify and find his father are interspersed with, and interrupted by, memories, fantasies, video games, letters, a collection of fables, the journal of a Kai Ten officer, and dreams. The palimpsestic, occasionally fantastic nature of number9dream destabilises a discrete sense of self as the narration does not signal to the reader when it has swerved into the imaginary. Thus it can be difficult to determine what is real and what is fabulation, and the traditional “coming-of-age”, “self-discovery” narrative arc associated with the bildungsroman is compromised. The following analysis of number9dream will therefore consider the ways in which individual, social, and environmental realities are constructed according to different modes of perception. The chapter will be divided into two major parts. The first section, entitled “Postmodernism in number9dream”, will explore how two key postmodern principles – hyperrealism and incredulity to metanarratives – complicate the notion of self. After a brief synopsis of the novel, I will consider how Mitchell establishes the novel’s concern with modes of perception and how perception constructs and controls identity. I will then argue that the novel depicts hyperrealism as a product of late capitalism and that Eiji’s sense of self is destabilised by his exposure to the hyperreal. From this discussion of identity, I consider the correlation between ontology and authorship as they are explored in the novel, and how notions of origins (and their importance to self-knowledge) are problematic in a postmodern world that rejects the authority of grand narratives. The second section of the chapter, entitled “The Planetary in number9dream”, will examine how the novel challenges the notion of a national identity through a conscious engagement with orientalism, the crisis of cognitive mapping, the juxtaposition of Eiji’s idea of “Japan” with that of his great-uncle Subaru Tsukiyama during the second World War, and through the engagement of number9dream with “transnational” Japanese artists such as Haruki Murakami and Hayao Miyazaki. I will then posit that the novel provides a critique of the ecologically-degrading facets of late capitalism, with particular focus on urbanisation. I will compare the novel’s condemnation of unsustainable development with Roszak’s challenge to “the scientific reality principle”, citing instances in the text where nature and the metaphysical are conflated. Finally, I will consider how the novel exemplifies Dimmock’s concept of “planetary time” by examining the novel’s depiction of time as not merely cyclical, but hybridised.

211 Kathryn Simpson, “Coming of Age in number9dream,” 71. I. Postmodernism in number9dream

The novel comprises a series of chapters, each presenting a different mode of perception or reality-construct, including fantasy, memory, genre, virtual reality, memoir, fable, dreams, and fate. This is an essential aspect of number9dream, that there is no definitive “reality”. Rather, all stories are told from a particular perspective, and therefore all stories are filtered through the bias, experience, and agenda of the storyteller. The subject of perception is consequently as important as the object of perception to the narrative. This is overtly signalled in the very first chapter, “PanOpticon”, through the invocation of Bentham’s “Panopticon”, a prison edifice designed to induce self- monitoring amongst inmates:

Each individual, in his place, is securely confined to a cell from which he is seen from the front by the supervisor; but the side walls prevent him from coming into contact with his companions. He is seen, but does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication.212 In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault adopts Bentham’s design as an analogy for the dynamics of power in society. Foucault identifies conformity as a function of social Panopticism, wherein the fear of being watched (and judged against the standard of societal norms) enforces self-regulation:

He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibilities for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.213 In number9dream, the PanOpticon is a commercial skyscraper that houses (among other businesses), the law firm in which Akiko Kaito works. The first chapter opens with Eiji planning to accost Akiko, as he is convinced that she is privy to his father’s identity. Eiji’s description of the skyscraper is ephemeral; he observes that it is “quite a sight, this zirconium gothic skyscraper. Its upper floors are hidden by clouds” (ND 3). Just as the source of power of Bentham’s panopticon is decentralised, the PanOpticon is sinister in an unquantifiable, “gothic” sense, perennially obscured from the sight of

212 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, (trans.) Alan Sheridan, (London: Allen Lane, 1977), 202-3. 213 Ibid., 202-3. those it observes. By rendering the PanOpticon as a commercial building, Mitchell is commenting on the function of surveillance in contemporary society.

In one of the fantasy sequences featured in the first chapter, Eiji follows Akiko to the “Ganymede Cinema” and buys a ticket to see the (fictional) film PanOpticon. This film, as it is described by Eiji, is set in a European prison run by “Warden Bentham” (ND 29). The Warden reminisces that the gaol was designed as “a Utopian prison, to raise the inmates’ mental faculties, to allow their imaginations to set them free” (ND 29). The prison itself, however, is derelict, and plagued by “the Voorman problem” – the worship of Voorman who is “a prisoner who maintains he is God” (ND 30).214 Dr Polonski, a psychologist, interviews Voorman, who declares himself to be a morally ambivalent God and the universe to be “a figment of [his] imagination” contrived for his own entertainment (ND 32). Voorman’s assertion that the universe is imagined, and that “demons are merely humans with demonic enough imaginations”, implies that reality is produced cognitively, rather than existing a priori to perception (ND 35).

The invocation of Panopticism in the first chapter of number9dream establishes the novel’s concern with the ways in which reality and identity are constructed by perception and by the experience of social gaze. From this premise, Mitchell depicts contemporary society, the society of late capitalism, as hyperreal. In my review of postmodern critical literature, I considered the concept of hyperrealism as put forward by Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulations. Eiji’s narration is replete with examples of the infiltration of the hyperreal into everyday life. He expresses the very rationale for his quest – to discover his father and assuage the feeling of lack associated with orphanhood – through a metaphor of simulacra:

All of these people with their boxes of memories labelled ‘Parents’. Good shots, bad shots, frightening figures, tender pictures, fuzzy angles, scratched negatives – it doesn’t matter, they know who ushered them on to Earth. (ND 3) In Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard identifies photographs as second-stage simulacra; images that claim verisimilitude of representation. Eiji’s high regard for

214 In keeping with Mitchell’s sustained references to the Beatles and John Lennon, it could be deduced that the name of the character “Voorman” alludes to Klaus Voormann, a bassist who performed with the Beatles, and who designed the cover art for “Revolver” and the “Anthology” albums. Voormann’s cover art collages illustration and photography in an emulation of Jameson’s notion of “depthlessness” in postmodern art, discernible through the distortion of ratio and perspective.

photography, implicit in his repeated correlation of photographs with memories, reveals the fusion of image and reality. The photo, the simulacrum, becomes “real”, not merely representation. Eiji’s interaction with photographs reflects the substitution of simulacra for a desired yet absent person. In his description of masturbation, for example, Eiji considers a number of subjects for his sexual fantasy, yet resorts to a virtual character as she is portrayed in an advertisement:

Who is riding the caravan of love tonight? Zizzi Hikaru, wet-suited as per the lager ad; the glam-rock mother of Yuki Chiyo; the waitress from Jupiter Café; Insectoid-woman from Zax Omega and Red Plague Moon. Back to good old Zizzi, I guess. (ND 48)

His engagement with the simulacrum is so absolute that he blames the object of his fantasy for the lacklustre experience, bemoaning that “Zizzi was disappointing tonight. No sense of timing” (ND 48). The simulacrum is thus deployed to fill a void in his life, hence Eiji prizes a picture of his deceased twin sister. He takes “Anju’s photograph out to the balcony, and [drinks his] coffee in her company” (ND 90). When he recovers a photograph of his father from the Yakuza (who kidnap him because of his connections to his friend, Yuzu Daimon), he treats it with the significance of a reunion:

I unfold the photo of my father one last time. Dad is still uncreased. Yes, we do look alike. My daydream was right in that respect, at least…I touch his cheekbone and hope, somewhere, he knows. (ND 167) The hope that his father is somehow telepathically connected with the photograph demonstrates Eiji’s immersion in the hyperreal. This immersion extends from photographs to all forms of simulacra. He interprets people, places, and his own personality through the lens (and tropes) of various media. He superimposes the expectations of genre upon his narrative, a tendency which is manifest in “Reclaimed Land”, in which he is entangled in a Yakuza war. The chapter itself pastiches the Yakuza genre through the two-dimensional characterisation of the Yakuza associates headed by Mr Morino - at one point Eiji observes “three identikit men from the catalogue of Yakuza henchmen” (ND 168). Eiji is only able to interpret his experiences through cinematic tropes, observing that “not for the first time today, I feel I have strayed into an action movie” (ND 197). The violence and horror that he witnesses is so disturbing, that he cannot articulate his revulsion. It is outside the realm of his experience, and he laments that: “I never learned the vocabulary needed to take this in. Only in war movies, horror movies: nightmares” (ND 200). Nevertheless, Eiji regards himself as “real”, reducing Morino’s entourage to caricatures by mentally labelling them according to their appearance: “Leatherjacket”, “Frankenstein”, “Popsicle”, and “Lizard”. Despite Eiji’s demarcation of his life as real and the Yakuza way of life as surreal, the ruthless Mr Morino challenges Eiji to reconsider his sense of reality:

You straight citizens of Japan are living in a movie set, Miyake. You are unpaid extras. The politicos are actors. But the true directors, the Nagasakis and Tsurus, you never see. A show is run from the wings, not centre-stage (ND 165) Spared from execution by the Yakuza by the whim of Leatherjacket, Eiji is traumatised, his response to the hyperreal fundamentally altered. After subsequently watching a violent movie, Eiji reflects that the distortion of gore into entertainment is “brutal and cheap and fake”, and “if people who dream up violent scripts ever came into contact with real violence, they would be too sickened to write such scenes” (ND 362).

In the controversial title of a book published in 1995, Jean Baudrillard declared that The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. This assertion makes sense only when it is deconstructed through the framework of the author’s theory of simulacra. Baudrillard argued that the Gulf War was the first conflict to be televised instantaneously. The “Gulf War” could be considered hyperreal because military strategy was informed by the panoptical gaze of the camera. Thus governmental and military action was motivated not merely by the political situation, but by how such action would be represented in the media. That is to say, an occurrence is neither real, nor valid, unless it has been documented by the media – “to be is to be perceived”.215 This case study reinforces the nature of the postmodern era in which the hyperreal is more “real” than the real, and it is the pervasiveness of this attitude which Mitchell emphasises and critiques in number9dream. For example, Eiji legitimises his fantasies of familial reunion by imagining himself as a famous soccer player:

I will be in newspapers and on TV all over the world. Our mother is so proud that she gives up drinking, but better still our father sees me, recognizes me, and drives to the airport to meet the team jet. Of course, Anju is waiting there too, and our mother, and we are reunited with the world watching. How perfect. How obvious. (ND 67)

215 Samuel C Rickless, “The Relationship Between Anti-Abstractionism and Idealism in Berkeley’s Metaphysics,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 20, no. 4 (2012), 728. Eiji indulges in this “perfect” fantasy despite being conscious that he is conforming to the “obvious” formula of feel-good family television. A more insidious side of the hyperreal’s capacity to legitimate a metanarrative of “truth” is its ability to obviate reality. When Eiji goes into hiding after his fraught encounter with the Yakuza, he is visited by Buntaro, his landlord and friend, who reassures him that the events he witnessed “never happened” because “it didn’t happen on the news” (ND 217). Yuzu Daimon, the playboy-turned-friend responsible for Eiji’s entanglement with the Yakuza, explains to him:

Yakuza wars make the police look crap and the politicos look bent…by admitting it, the voters of Tokyo may be prompted to wonder why they bother paying taxes. So it gets kept off TV. (ND 230) Simulacra (the news) not only obscure reality but produce a reality that does not exist. Mitchell identifies in several different instances that simulacra have a distorting function. Eiji’s description of television screens, in particular, point to the inescapable bias behind the production of film and television. He observes the distortion of his own TV; “its greens are mauves and its blues pink” (ND 60). Similarly, when Mr Aoyama, an official at Ueno Station, takes hostages after suffering a mental breakdown and the events are broadcast across the country, Eiji notes that “the picture is being taken with a night camera – light is orange and dark is brown” (ND 89). The ultimate indicator of the hyperreal as distortion is Eiji’s inability to identify himself in the simulacrum. When walking through the streets of Tokyo, he “[wanders] past an electronics shop, and on TV [sees] someone familiar walking past an electronics shop. He stops, examines the TV, amazed and semi-appalled at how he must appear to other people” (ND 100). This is not the only instance in number9dream when Eiji is alienated from his own image. When Eiji is abducted by the Yakuza for the second time, he is forced to play a game of cards to determine whether he will live or die. He observes while playing the card game that “a man is filming me with a handycam, and on a large overhead screen I see myself” (ND 356). The monitor depicts Eiji from many angles, greatly magnified. His terror causes derealisation: “I feel as if Miyake is operating Miyake by remote-control. I look at myself on the screen. Myself stares back, I never knew I looked like that” (ND 359).

Despite the disjunction between self and the spectacle of the self, the novel explores the mass-obsession with the hyperreal as a space for fantasy and escapism. number9dream essentially examines whether the hyperreal can create a satisfactory “place” (to use the phrase coined by Satoru in Ghostwritten) in which one can find self-affirmation and cohesion. Eiji contemplates this fundamental quandary, reflecting that there are “all these people like my mother paying counsellors and clinics to reattach them to reality: all these people like me paying Sony and Sega to reattach us to unreality” (ND 102). Significantly, Eiji uses the infinitive “to reattach”, thereby refuting the idea that the individual is naturally located in either the real or the unreal. This existential uncertainty is reiterated by Yuzu Daimon later in the chapter when he plays a racing game with Eiji and two female companions designated metonymically by Eiji (on the basis of their clothing) as “Velvet”, and “Coffee”. The latter remarks that the experience of the game is “better than the real thing”, yet she is corrected by Daimon, who murmurs that the experience is “realer than the real thing” (ND 108). Daimon and Eiji thereby undercut the distinction between the real and the hyperreal, signifying the postmodern destabilisation of metanarratives of “reality”. In the postmodern era, the “real” is so contaminated and influenced by the hyperreal (as in Baudrillard’s characterisation of the Gulf War), that no distinction can be identified.

Underscoring the impulse to find a “place” in the hyperreal is a sense of postmodern alienation. The software Virtua Sapiens claims that “you will never be lonely again”, purporting to fill the void of alienation (ND 126). In reality, computer games result in the depreciation of human interaction; hence Buntaro informs Eiji that “the average Japanese father spends seventeen minutes per day with his sprog. The average schoolboy spends ninety-five minutes per day inside video games” (ND 134). Eiji resorts to video games to simulate a reunion with his father, yet in both instances (the simulated and ‘real’ reunions) the results are disappointing. In Virtua Sapiens, the software simply replicates Eiji’s appearance and “has given him my nose and mouth, but made him jowlier and thinned his hair” (ND 126). The program is incapable of resolving Eiji’s complex emotions towards his parents, ultimately rejecting him from the virtual “home”. The quasi-realism of the program, however, moves Eiji to empathise with his CGI parents, observing: “what a pair of virtual parents the program generated for me! They are thinking, what a virtual son reality generated for us” (ND 129). Irrespective of which plane is more “real” – reality or the hyperreal – or if such a distinction even exists, there is a sense of isolation motivating the desire to “reattach”, to feel a sense of belonging within a narrative, whether it be real or unreal. In number9dream Mitchell depicts the stages of simulacra and the ways in which contemporary society engages with the hyperreal. The simulacrum distorts reality whilst claiming to reflect it, as evinced in the novel’s cynical appraisal of “the news”. The simulacrum produces a reality that bears no relation to, and cannot be considered a signifier of, reality. This is apparent in Eiji’s engagement with the program Virtua Sapiens. The critical concern with simulacra and society in the novel, however, is how simulacra destabilise the distinction between the real and the unreal. As was alluded to earlier, Eiji’s narration is permeated by cinematic terminology. His fantasies, self- esteem, and interpretation of events and people are informed by tropes and values espoused in the hyperreal; whether in the form of advertisements, films, or video games. His deference to the structures and clichés of the hyperreal over his own real-life experiences reflects the contemporary immersion in the hyperreal. The “Video Games” chapter exemplifies this societal immersion. Gaming and virtual activity, however, is depicted in the novel as rooted in disaffection and loss. Eiji designs his forays into the virtual world as a cathartic simulation of his strongest desire – to find his father. This quest, however, is merely one articulation of his desire for a coherent understanding of his own identity. That is to say, Eiji desires to contextualise himself within a greater narrative, thereby achieving self-knowledge and belonging simultaneously.

Eiji’s quest to find his father, his discomfort with “dronehood”, and his lack of interest in money are conducive to a growing awareness of the hyperreal. This scepticism is detected in the conclusion of “Video Games”. Eiji believes he has reached the conclusion of the game by discovering the prison cell of his father under the symbolic pseudonym “Ned Ludd”, which is in turn a parodic allusion to the anti-Industrial Luddites of the nineteenth-century. In the game, his father is “the man who will free humanity from the tyranny of OuterNet. The revolution to reverse reality starts now” (ND 149). It is a trap, however, and the game concludes with the revelation that “Ned Ludd is a project created by OuterNet to detect antiGame tendencies among players, and assess their potential danger to OuterNet” (ND 149). The term “OuterNet”, although never explained in the novel, signifies the world outside the virtual plane of the Internet. Eiji’s desire to “reverse reality” in the game is a desire to reclaim the real world from the dominion of the hyperreal. The game, however, defeats Eiji and affirms Baudrillard’s characterisation of the age of pure simulacra, as it declares to Eiji that “the very idea that ideology can ever defeat the image is itself insanity” (ND 149). Eiji’s scepticism of the hyperreal does not release him from the sovereignty of the simulacra. He is living in a postmodern world, in which the distinction between real and hyperreal has collapsed and his language, worldview, and self-awareness are conditioned by the rigours of the simulacra. Furthermore, the loss of metanarratives that accompanies the collapse of the real/unreal distinction (that is to say, the incapacity of any narrative to claim absolute authority), dispels any hope of a discrete sense of self. Eiji’s coming-of- age narrative is therefore unstable, as the mediation of his identity by the hyperreal and the lack of legitimation provided by a grand narrative ensure that who Eiji “is” cannot be definitively established.

In the first chapter I discussed how the loss of grand narratives results in an inability to legitimate, or make claims for, narratives of truth. Without a stable premise upon which to defend a conception of identity, without the capacity to situate (or cognitively map) oneself in contemporary society, the distinction between self and the external collapses. This causes a crisis of identity and a refutation of the notion of personal style, and consequently, of originality.

The central theme of the Goatwriter fables is this very question of originality in fiction. After escaping the Yakuza, Eiji hides in a suburban home belonging to a writer who is the sister of Mrs Sasaki (Eiji’s boss at Ueno Station). He reads her children’s tales about the “Goatwriter”. The chapter devoted to Goatwriter is titled “Study of Tales”, referring not only to the writer’s literal study, but also to the chapter’s exploration of narrative form. Goatwriter, the aptly named goat and professional author, is a character in Mrs Sasaki’s sister’s short stories who is motivated by his desire to write a “truly untold tale” (ND 211). Implicit in Goatwriter’s quest is the presumption that all stories have already been told, and that any new narratives are variations on old tales. Furthermore, the land in which Goatwriter resides is a fictive space which is portrayed through a vocabulary of textuality as, for example, in Goatwriter’s initial description of the terrain to the hen who serves as his housekeeper and companion: “inky landscape, paperpulp sky. I remain in little doubt, Mrs Comb, we are in the margins” (ND 206). The imagery of text that permeates the landscape reinforces the notion that stories exist externally. That is to say, a story is not spontaneously produced from the imagination of the author but, rather, narratives are modelled on pre-existing stories. To that extent, then, all stories are metaphorically written by “ghost-writers”. The initial Goatwriter passage, entitled “Margins”, depicts Goatwriter composing his “truly untold tale” which mysteriously disappears the next day. The source of inspiration for Goatwriter, however, was “the whisperings” which “he had come to believe…had their origins in his fountain pen – the selfsame pen Lady Shonagon wrote her pillow book with, over thirteen thousand crescent moons ago” (ND 205). Goatwriter sets out on a physical journey to recover his pen after it is stolen, thereby rediscovering the whisperings and the “truly untold tale”. Goatwriter’s creative process reveals literature as being perpetually in dialogue with other works and narratives. The source of originality – the whisperings – ironically comes from the instrument of another author, Lady Shonagon. Furthermore, the whisperings themselves, whether or not they are in fact products of Goatwriter’s psyche, are distinct from the author, even vulnerable to abduction. The whisperer is eventually discovered in a forest. She is “a girl with flaxen hair [who] swing-swung, singing a melody with no beginning and no name” (ND 226). It is significant that her melody – the story comprising the whisperings and therefore the “truly untold tale” – has no beginning. Origin is thus a negligible feature that does not contribute to the meaning of her tale. Meaning resides in death, hence the girl advises Goatwriter that “untold tales are in the highlands”, only accessible via the sacred pool (ND 256). The pool, “cold and sudden as death itself”, is in fact deadly to any swimmer (ND 257). In continuation of the novel’s theme of recurrence, however, the chapter concludes with Goatwriter’s afterlife. It is insinuated that after death, Goatwriter arrives at the home of the woman writing his story. Goatwriter ascends the stairs and enters the library-attic and encounters the writing bureau and the pen of Lady Shonagon. These sentient instruments of authorship greet Goatwriter, yet the author herself is notably absent.

Goatwriter simultaneously represents the text and the author. He can be read as signifying the author-function through several allusions to Mitchell’s own persona.216 The Goatwriter fables thus elaborate Roland Barthes’ theory of the death of the author, wherein:

As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol

216 The term “Goatwriter” echoes “ghost-writer”, evoking Mitchell’s first novel Ghostwritten. Furthermore, Goatwriter has a stammer – a speech impediment which he shares with Mitchell and which is explored in greater detail in Black Swan Green. itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins.217 Goatwriter, as a symbol of the author (Mrs Sasaki’s sister), writes his/her own death. She dramatizes the process of text-destroying-the-author. This scenario could be interpreted in a number of ways. Goatwriter’s quest to be original in his work can only be achieved after he steps outside the boundaries of the narrative and replaces the author. In this instance, Goatwriter represents the text, which thus has authority and meaning that are independent from the author. Alternatively, as Walter Benjamin’s asserted, “death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death”.218 Goatwriter can only write “the truly untold tale” after he dies and returns to his point of origin – the writing bureau.

The dramatization of the Barthesian incident of the death of the author has further implications for matters of ontology. Barthes argued that limitations are imposed upon a text when it is conceived as being determined by, and reflective of, the author. That is to say, the author is considered as the “past of his own book” and that “he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child”.219 Barthes’ correlation between father and child and author and text, wherein the father/author provides meaning to the child/text, is a binary that is reproduced and challenged throughout number9dream. This binary is manifest through the dynamics between Mrs Sasaki’s sister and Goatwriter, God and Jesus Christ, and Eiji and his father.

Barthes referred to the “Author-God”, and the Christ figure appears in different incarnations throughout number9dream, representing (different aspects of) the father/child, author/text binary. Goatwriter, Mrs Comb, and Pithecanthropus encounter a scarecrow which is:

[…] nailed to a ‘T’, staked into the lip of a dyke, in a sorry state. His eyes and ears were pecked away, and wispy hay bled from a wound in his side whenever the wind bothered to blow. (ND 211) The evocation of Jesus crucified is reinforced by the scarecrow’s utterance that “this day…we shall sit with my father in Paradise” (ND 211). The scarecrow is subsequently

217 Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath, (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), 142. 218 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 94. 219 Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, 145. mauled by the “word hounds” who admonish him for prophesying the future: “that’ll learn ‘im…to give the plot away” (ND 212). In his second incarnation, Jesus is a dreadlocked hippie who laments his incapacity to prevent war. He informs Mrs Comb that “time was, we had a divine veto on wars, but our executive powers got whittled away, bit by bit, and now nobody even bothers consulting us” (ND 220). The third and final appearance of Christ occurs in the forest surrounding the sacred pool. A man who “slid out a long thorn from his crown” emerges through the trees and introduces himself as a writer (ND 262). The Faustian Christ laments the unintended legacy of his “successful novel”:

“I never thought anyone would actually want to publish it, you see, but they did, it was snatched from me, and the more I wished every extant copy would explode like a puffball, the more copies the lamentable thing sold. Its errors, its posturing, its arrogance! Oh, I would sell my soul to pyre the entire run. But alas, Mephistopheles never returned my fax, and the words I unloosed have dogged me ever since”. (ND 262) The “word hounds” are thus the words that have “dogged” Christ. In these passages about the scarecrow and the man in the forest, the text is attempting to kill the author. The hippie Christ represents a breach between the modern and the postmodern, as well as the loss of ontological metanarratives.

Mitchell’s depictions of Christ are contentious. There is the implication that the Bible is a work of fiction, and God the Father (who is described in patriarchal terminology) is associated only with “stable democracies”. This challenge to the Christian metanarrative is tempered, however, by the role of “hippie” Jesus who is assigned to “war zones and peacekeeping missions” (ND 221). This version of Jesus confesses a dissimilarity to his father, and rescues Mrs Comb from nearly being killed and eaten by hungry villagers, who have been ignored by “a white Jeep from a peacekeeping organization [which] drove past…taking lots of photographs and news footage” (ND 225). Hippie Jesus represents the positive aspects of a metanarrative of truth that has otherwise reinforced the power of the powerful. The schism between father and son, the West and its Christian past, God and the Bible, represents the loss of the grand narrative as a source of legitimation. Meaning is no longer inherited or determined by God, by a father, or by a homogenising metanarrative. The analogy between Eiji and Goatwriter is established through Eiji’s reaction upon entering Mrs Sasaki’s sister’s study, his reflection that there are “enough books to make me wonder if I am a book too (ND 210). This entrance into a world of books anticipates the world of writing illustrated in the Goatwriter fables. The critical parity between Goatwriter and Eiji is the way in which their respective quests challenge the author/text, father/child binary. Eiji’s search for his father is an ontological quest. He believes his own identity cannot be confirmed until he understands his origins. In a sense he looks to his father as his “author”. This belief is challenged by Ai (Eiji’s love interest), who articulates the novel’s incredulity towards metanarratives. Ai argues that meaning in life is determined by the individual according to “how they see why they are here” (ND 300). Implicit in Ai’s assertion is the notion that meaning resides in the eye of the beholder. Ai’s suggestion that meaning is assigned by the mind or, to quote Eiji, “meaning is just something the mind ‘does’”, is a suggestion that undermines the authority of metanarratives to dictate a fixed notion of morality and value (ND 299). By contrast, and in a Lyotardian vein, truth is provisional and local. Eiji’s quest to meet his father, a quest which he professes to be the source of meaning in his life, symbolises deference to external validation provided by metanarratives. When Eiji finally meets his father he feels rage and contempt, rather than fulfilment or self-actualisation. His father is so irrelevant to his identity that Eiji feels “shame that his blood is in my veins” (ND 375). Goatwriter is only capable of writing a “truly untold tale” after he has replaced the author. Eiji, once he meets his father, symbolically rejects him as a source of meaning, thus replacing his father as the arbiter (or author) of his own meaning. Rose Harris- Birtill has argued that Eiji achieves an important personal victory over society by abandoning his quest:

Eiji’s obsession with his paternal origins is finally exposed as another panoptic model constructed around a powerful controlling center, with Eiji’s final rejection of his quest to find his father as one of his textual acts of resistance that provide a form of escape from the viral panoptic structures.220 He symbolically transfers the power of self-definition from a traditional source of authority to himself, becoming less susceptible to the panoptical pressure to behave according to the mores of a late capitalist society.

220 Rose Harris-Birtill, “‘A Row of Screaming Russian Dolls’: Escaping the Panopticon in David Mitchell’s number9dream,” 56. In Melancholy and the Archive: Trauma, History and Memory in the Contemporary Novel, Jonathan Boulter examines the role that memory plays in constructing Eiji’s identity. Boulter identifies the recurrent theme of loss within Eiji’s quest; the loss of his mother and his twin sister Anju, and the loss of his father implicit in the latter’s anonymity. Boulter proposes that:

number9dream thus is a novel about nostalgia, in the sense that nostalgia is a mode of being that places the subject in continual relation to the past; in Miyake’s case, his nostalgia is what Derrida calls the nostalgia for origins, a desire to return (nostalgia means “return”) to the source of being, the Father.221 The ontological quest, therefore, is not merely a quest for origins as a source of self- explication, but is motivated by “Miyake’s desire…to kill the memory of the father – the (phantasmic) memory of his desertion”.222 The eventual encounter with his father provides Eiji with “release” (ND 375) only because he acknowledges that “meaninglessness resides within this externalized fantasy” that his father can rectify the past or provide him with meaning.223

The dramatization of the relation between author and text in the Goatwriter tales is just one example of the novel’s exploration of identity and meaning through metafiction. Mitchell’s fiction is replete with intertextual allusion, and number9dream exemplifies how he employs the literary device to enhance the thematic and philosophical concerns of a novel. Baryon Posadas interprets the instances of intertextuality in number9dream as evidence of the novel “addressing the very problem of originality”.224 Mitchell’s abundant recourse to intertextuality highlights the issue of whether there is such a thing as a “truly untold tale”, or whether all narratives are simply variations of old stories and genres. Just as it is impossible to disentangle Eiji’s identity from the mediations of the hyperreal, so it is at times difficult to recognise what is “original” in number9dream and what is revisionary. The novel invites this consideration through its title, which is an allusion to “#9dream”, the seventh track on John Lennon’s Walls and Bridges album. The elliptical transitions between reality and fantasy that characterise number9dream resonate with the lyrics of Lennon’s surreal composition: “so long ago/Was it in a

221 Jonathon Boulter, Melancholy and the Archive: Trauma, History and Memory in the Contemporary Novel, 118. 222 Ibid., 122. In fact, “nostalgia” means “pain associated with return”. 223 Ibid., 129. 224 Baryon Posadas, “Remediations of ‘Japan’ in number9dream,” 88. dream, was it just a dream? I know, yes I know/Seemed so very real, it seemed so real to me”.225 Prior to reconciling with his mother towards the end of the novel, Eiji falls asleep and dreams of encountering John Lennon. Eiji professes his particular fondness for “#9dream”, and (the fictional) Lennon helpfully deconstructs the song accordingly:

“#9dream” is a descendant of “Norwegian Wood”. Both are ghost stories. “She” in “Norwegian Wood” curses you with loneliness. The “Two spirits dancing so strange” in “#9dream” bless you with harmony. But people prefer loneliness to harmony. (ND 398) “Norwegian Wood” connotes not only the Beatles’ track from The White Album, but also the novel of the same name by Haruki Murakami. Posadas argues that “the novel implicitly positions itself as a kind of intertextual doppelganger of the fiction of Murakami Haruki”.226 The connection between Murakami and Mitchell is signalled by the fictional Lennon’s association of “Norwegian Wood” with “#9dream”. There are numerous parallels between number9dream and Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, the most obvious being the respective narrators. Eiji Miyake resembles Murakami’s Toru Watanabe as both are young men who move to Tokyo in an attempt to process the loss of a loved one. Eiji is haunted by the death of his twin sister, Anju, while Toru struggles with the loss of his friend, Kizuki, who has committed suicide. Both narratives explore maturation and identity in a postmodern world, and conclude without finality. Hearing via the radio that an earthquake that has struck Tokyo, causing mass destruction and disabling telephone lines, Eiji puts on his shoes and declares to the reader in the present tense: “And I begin running” (ND 418). Toru, having emerged from the initial stage of grieving over the suicide of his former lover, Naoko, calls Midori (a friend and potential lover) and confesses his desire that “the two of us. . .begin everything from the beginning”.227 Unlike Eiji, however, who reacts with determination in the face of the unknown, Toru is overwhelmed. Midori asks Toru where he is and, unable to answer, Toru muses “Where was I now? I had no idea. No idea at all. Where was this place? All that flashed into my eyes were the countless shapes of people walking by to nowhere. Again and again I called out for Midori from the dead centre of this place that was no place”.228 Toru’s plight evokes the postmodern crisis of cognitive mapping. His desire to “begin everything from the beginning” is undermined by his incapacity to define

225 John Lennon, “#9 Dream,” by John Lennon, recorded June-July 1974, on Walls and Bridges, Apple, compact disc. 226 Baryon Posadas, “Remediations of ‘Japan’ in number9dream,” 80. 227 Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood, (trans.) Jay Rubin, (London: Vintage Books, 2001), 386. 228 Ibid., himself in relation to the world. A discrete and profound sense of individuality is lost, implicit in his depthless description of the crowd as “shapes of people”.

The fictional John Lennon’s appraisal of “two spirits” who bless with harmony and curse with loneliness encapsulates the approach of both these novels to the postmodern crisis of self. number9dream concludes with harmony – Eiji is not stultified by his isolation; rather he inclines to the notion that “maybe the meaning of life lies in the act of looking for it” (ND 288). Norwegian Wood, by contrast, ends with an acute sense of loneliness and disconnection.

Norwegian Wood is not the only Murakami text to be referenced in number9dream. Posadas has identified the quest-narrative of Mitchell’s novel as strikingly similar to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (which Eiji reads in number9dream); both novels feature the memoirs of disaffected World War II veterans, as well as clairvoyant sisters who deal professionally in dreams.229 Murakami’s novels A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance feature the “sheep man” (which Posadas compares to Goatwriter), as well as heralding an era of postmodernity.230 Although number9dream has been described as “Murakami drenched”, different aspects of the novel feature as reimaginations of other texts.231 The cyberpunk qualities of the novel are paralleled with explicit allusions to Bladerunner, The Terminator and The Matrix; Eiji’s flights of fantasy recall “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” (underscored by a box of matches given to Eiji from “Mitty’s” bar); and his existential crisis is highlighted by references to the manga series Ghost in the Shell, the film Paris, Texas, and the novel No Longer Human. The narrative of number9dream resembles Sky Castle Laputa, a film by Hayao Miyazaki which is treasured by Eiji and Anju. Like number9dream, Sky Castle Laputa explores the lives of two orphaned children, a boy and a girl. Eiji’s sense of guilt over the drowning of Anju resonates with Patzu’s determination to protect Sheeta. Furthermore, the fate of Miyazaki’s protagonists is determined by the identity of their deceased parents. Patzu’s life goal is to vindicate his father by proving the latter’s claim that Laputa exists. Sheeta, who discovers her parents’ true identity as members of the royal family of Laputa, is embroiled in the wider political struggle for the reclamation of the lost land of Laputa. Eiji similarly suffers for his connection to his estranged father,

229 Baryon Posadas, “Remediations of ‘Japan’ in number9dream,” 88. 230 Matthew Strecher, “Beyond ‘Pure’ Literature”: Mimesis, Formula, and the Postmodern in the Fiction of Murakami Haruki,” Journal of Asian Studies 57, no. 2 (1998), 131. 231 David Mitchell, “David Mitchell, The Art of Fiction No. 204”. finding himself implicated in a quarrel between Yakuza factions. In both texts the discovery of the quest-object, Laputa and Daisuke Tsukiyama respectively, does not result in a meaningful denouement for the identities (or futures) of Sheeta, Patzu or Eiji. Freedom of self-definition is enabled only through the destruction of Laputa, and through Eiji’s realisation of the irrelevance of Tsukiyama to his own identity. There are also resonances between number9dream and Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies, an animated film produced by Miyazaki’s production company, Studio Ghibli. Grave of the Fireflies portrays the plight of two children, a brother and sister, orphaned during the Second World War. The film opens in a train station, in which the brother, Seita, is dying from malnutrition. In number9dream, a co-worker of Eiji’s, Suga, makes reference to the historical basis of this scene when he drunkenly tells Eiji “ByebyeUenobyebye, badvibes, bad, badbadbadvibes in Ueno, where allverlostnf’gottn orphans ended after the war, did did y’knowthat? Died like flies, poorlittlpootlittl…” (ND 295). Reinforcing the homage is the fact that Mitchell sets his chapter about memory – “Lost Property” – in a train station. Eiji’s grief-saturated recollections of Anju and the circumstances of her death recall the opening scene of Grave of the Fireflies, in which Seita hears the voice of his dead sister Setsuko calling for their (also deceased) mother.

There are numerous intertextual allusions throughout number9dream, and the examples considered above demonstrate the postmodern condition in which there are no “truly untold tales”, but merely retellings of established narratives. These examples, however, also point to another function of intertextuality in the novel: that is, to deterritorialise literature. Murakami’s work, often invoked by Mitchell, has been frequently described as having “a strikingly international ambience”.232 Matthew Strecher observes that Murakami defies the usual conventions of Japanese syntax by over-using the first- person pronoun “I”. In Strecher’s analysis, “the result of this prodigious use of the first- person familiar “Boku” is to lend the text a rather un-Japanese atmosphere, almost as though it were translated from English”.233 The “un-Japanese atmosphere” in part derives from Murakami’s consistent depiction of characters as consumers of Western commodities, with each of his novels casually referring to beer and cigarette brands as well as frequent descriptions of characters cooking non-Japanese food such as pasta or

232 Matthew Strecher, “Beyond ‘Pure’ Literature”: Mimesis, Formula, and the Postmodern in the Fiction of Murakami Haruki,” 356. Emphasis in original. 233 Ibid. sausages. The protagonists almost invariably enjoy the Beatles and American Jazz artists such as Duke Wellington. Mitchell echoes these idiosyncrasies in number9dream. Eiji is a devotee of John Lennon, smokes “Kool”, and is eventually employed in a pizzeria called “Nero’s”. References to the work of the film director and animator Hayao Miyazaki, most specifically to his film Sky Castle Laputa, in number9dream reinforce this self-conscious alignment of Mitchell’s novel of Japan with “transnational” Japanese art, rather than with “pure” or junbungaku literature.234 Susan Napier observes that the early work of Miyazaki incorporated

[…] global fantasy, legends, and science fiction to create original stories that reinforced a distinctly transnational message focusing on human responsibility and the oneness of humans with nature and minimizing distinctive racial or national characteristics.235 Sky Castle Laputa, an animated film in the steampunk subgenre that refers to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (implicit in the titular reference to Swift’s floating island), depicts European-styled architecture, landscapes, and attire. The film is permeated with an ecological critique, as the magic of Laputa is exploited by competing parties, culminating in its destruction.

The association of Eiji Miyake’s narrative with numerous analogous narratives undermines any sense of originality or distinct identity. The novel’s preoccupation with gaze (as established in “Panopticon”), its exploration into social and individual engagement with the hyperreal, and the rejection of grand narratives of truth and external sources of meaning complicate the very notion of a identity. Eiji’s bildungsroman is thus best conceived of in the words of Kathryn Simpson: “in a postmodern bildungsroman, the ‘[Real Eiji Miyake]’ is perhaps always an impossible dream and identity always provisional, contingent, and in process”.236 It is an assessment which is equally applicable to the conception of nationality and the planetary in number9dream.

II. The Planetary in number9dream

In Ghostwritten, Satoru justifies his hyperreal “place” (jazz music) by citing the impossibility to spatially locate oneself in a postmodern cityscape. number9dream

234 Ibid., 354. 235 Susan J. Napier, “Confronting Master Narratives: History as Vision in Miyazaki Hayao’s Cinema of De-Assurance,” Positions – East Asia Cultures Critique 9, no. 2 (2001), 475. 236 Kathryn Simpson, “Coming of Age in number9dream,” 71. engages with space and identity, reflecting upon the signification of ‘Japan’, how this signification has changed, and the increasing dissonance between the natural landscape and the cities that have been “grafted onto” that landscape (to use Quasar’s term). Mitchell depicts the changing notions of “Japan” through the contrast between Eiji and his great-uncle Subaru Tsukiyama. Eiji reflects on the amorphous nature of Japanese identity after reading about Tsukiyama’s kamikaze sacrifice:

What would Subaru Tsukiyama say about Japan today? Was it worth dying for? Maybe he would reply that this Japan is not the Japan he did die for. The Japan he died for never came into being. It was a possible future, auditioned by the present but rejected with other dreams. (ND 310) Subaru’s fiercely exclusivist, wartime Japan is not without transcultural cross- pollination. Kusakabe, a comrade of Subaru, reads passages from Coriolanus, a tragedy in which a legendary warrior lives and dies by a very different code of values. Prior to the launch of the kamikaze attack, the kaiten pilots listen to Duke Wellington, despite the official ban on jazz music (ND 311). The psychology of the kaiten officers is informed by their interpretation of the Yamato-damashii spirit, a conception of Japanese identity that is fundamentally opposed to surrender (ND 305). The patriotic fervour with which the kaiten officers regard their mission is challenged by Kusakabe, who declares that “we have lost this war by swallowing our own propaganda” (ND 305). Subaru’s description of the kamikaze mission differs from his earlier journal entries as his language reverts from bellicosity to ambiguity. Rather than a warrior, he describes himself as the Americans’ “executioner” (ND 315). After failing to detonate the warhead of his kaiten, the oxygen-deprived Subaru reflects in devastation upon the mission he once romanticised: “kaiten was not way to glorious death. Kaiten is urn. Sea is tomb. Do not blame us who die so long before noon” (ND 316). The journal of Subaru thus explores the potential for national identity to dictate individual identity in extremis; hence Eiji’s rumination that “I am not made by me, or my parents, but by the Japan that did come into being” (ND 310).

The “Japan that did come into being”, according to the novel, is one that is increasingly dominated by the hyperreal. It is important at this juncture to consider the question of Mitchell’s authority to depict an essential “Japan”. The novel invites an orientalist critique not merely through its status as an English-language novel, but through the allusion to Panopticism and the emphasis on gaze. In Orientalism, Edward Said repeatedly refers to Foucault’s conception of gaze as a form of dominance and it can hardly be considered coincidental, then, that Mitchell acknowledges, indeed critically appraises, the factors of gaze and dominance and how these forces impact upon identity in his Japanese novel. Orientalism, in Posadas’ assessment, however, presupposes “that there is such a thing as a discrete and identifiably authentic ‘Japan’ out there, outside of the discursive practices through which its image is produced”.237 In a globalised, late capitalist society, however, countries are “image-commodities that are trans-nationally produced and circulated”.238 This attitude to place is encapsulated in a remark by Coffee: “like, who says you need to go to a place to know about it? What do you think TV is for?” (ND 110). By collapsing the distinction between a nation and its cultural representation or fetishized image, Posadas complicates the notion of national identity. That is to say, the orientalising gaze is internalised and naturalised; Japan is “at once a space constituted in and as fantasy”.239 According to Posadas, number9dream “recognizes the impossibility of locating a ‘Japan’ not already mediated and subsumed under the logics of global modernity”.240 Posadas’ argument can be reframed in Jamesonian terminology as the postmodern crisis of cognitive mapping. He focuses on the depiction of Tokyo as an “image-saturated space” wherein the barrage of images ensures that any “sense of coherent meaning becomes impossible”.241

The Tokyo of number9dream is a space in which the distinction between real and hyperreal has been obliterated. I have discussed at length the hyperrealism of Tokyo culture, but a crucial component of this culture is the impact it has on the individual’s sense of orientation. Eiji observes that “Tokyo is so close up you cannot always see it. No distances. Everything is over your head – dentists, kindergartens, dance studios” (ND 3). He is incapable of comprehending the size and nuances of Tokyo, which is not depicted as a mere cityscape, but as indistinguishable from a global network. Eiji repeatedly refers to “advertland”, which simultaneously encroaches upon his individual space and connects him to the wider world (ND 350). After a disagreement with Ai, Eiji reacts to an advertisement as an intrusion, reflecting that “the jolly citizens of advertland mock me with their minty smiles” (ND 350). For Eiji, there is no escaping the network

237 Baryon Posadas, “Remediations of ‘Japan’ in number9dream,” 78. 238 Ibid., 79. 239 Ibid., 77. 240 Ibid., 81. 241 Ibid., 83. of late capitalism, poignantly signified when he stops running from the Yakuza and sits down on a bench outside a factory:

“I don’t know why anyone put a bench there, but I sat down gratefully, in the shade of a giant Nike trainer. I hate this world. NIKE. THERE IS NO FINISHING LINE” (ND 224). Late capitalism generates the crisis of cognitive mapping because the omnipresence of advertising and the media obviates the boundaries between the local and the global. There is indeed “no finishing line”.

Underpinning the narrative of number9dream are the first traces of the ecological drama that pervades Mitchell’s work. In the first chapter, a fierce storm strikes whilst Eiji is waiting in the Jupiter Café. He describes the Tokyo weather as “extraplanetary”, and imagines the logical consequence of such extreme weather (ND 17). In his fantasy, Tokyo is flooded, and as he attempts to rescue Ai Imajo, who is caught in the flood, he is attacked by a crocodile. The crocodile drags him to “the floor of the Pacific”, which Eiji notes is “heavily urbanized” (ND 20). This is the first of a series of connections in the novel between urbanization and extreme, or “extraplanetary”, weather. The novel imbues landscape with power, yet the characterisations of the rural (represented in the novel by Yakushima and the Island of Kyushu) and the city (Tokyo) are deeply dissimilar. Eiji describes Kyushu as “the run-wild underworld of Japan”, from which “all myths slithered, galloped or swam” (ND 392). He thus suggestively conflates the environment with old-world spirituality, much like the “Holy Mountain” in Ghostwritten. The thunder god is a prime example of this correlation between spiritual power and nature. Eiji attends the shrine of the thunder god and begs for help in a soccer game in exchange for anything. The interchange is one that is imagined in Eiji’s memory, and the thunder god’s responses are recorded as the “silence’s” response. When his sister Anju drowns, Eiji believes (with horror) that it is the price he must pay for his deal with the thunder god. His subsequent antagonism toward the thunder god does not undermine his belief in the supernatural power animating the Kyushu environs. The typhoon which occurs towards the end of the novel is interpreted by Eiji as “the god of thunder…stamping over Kagoshima, looking for me” (ND 407). Eiji continues to associate his own identity with Shinto metanarratives. In remembering Anju, he describes her as part of the landscape. She is an adept tree-climber, and her physical description mirrors the wilds of Kyushu. She is “copper-skinned, willow-limbed, moss- stained, thorn-scorned, dungareed, ponytail knotted back” (ND 45). After Anju drowns, Eiji runs away to the forest and makes a wish:

Yet for the first time in three days, I want something. I want the forest lord to turn me into a cedar. The very oldest islanders say that if you are in the interior mountains on the night when the forest lord counts his trees, he includes you in the number and turns you into a tree. (ND 291) Eiji dreams that this wish has come true, yet after waking he returns home. In “Kai Ten”, Eiji ponders if “what Eiji Miyake means [is] still rooted on Yakushima, magicked into a cedar on a mist-forgotten mountain flank, and my search for my father just a vague…passing…nothing?” (ND 291). Eiji’s sense of isolation in, and hatred of, Tokyo stems from his sense of belonging to Kyushu. He feels like “a soul returning to a body” when he arrives in Kyushu, yet in Tokyo he feels as if he is “on holiday on another planet, passing myself off as a native alien” (ND 392, 56). Eiji is aware of the spatial composition of Dasein (which I discussed in the chapter dedicated to Ghostwritten), and Tokyo strips him of this crucial aspect of identity.

The aforementioned association between urbanization and “extraplanetary” weather implies causation, namely that urbanization and industrialisation pose a threat to the earth. This threat is articulated in Eiji’s dream of a dystopian future, in which:

[…] all Japan has been concreted over. The last sacred forests have been cut down for chopsticks, the inland sea has been paved over and declared a national carpark, and where mountains once stood apartment buildings vanish into the clouds. (ND 411) There is an indictment of this rampant urbanization, made clear in the image of the denigration of sacred forests for the purposes of human consumption. The inland sea that is concreted over in Eiji’s dream recalls “reclaimed land” and its symbolic function in the fourth chapter. The site of the Yakuza showdown is on a new airport development that has paved over part of the seashore, literally, reclaimed land. In the turf-war between Yakuza factions, it is significant that the attempt to reclaim political territory results in mutually-assured destruction. In a conversation prior to the showdown, Leatherjacket, who is revealed to be Subhataar from Ghostwritten, describes nightmares as “our wilder ancestors returning to reclaim land. Land tamed and grazed, by our softer, fatter, modern, waking selves” (ND 190). The hyperreal structures – or “places” – upon which the postmodern subject founds their sense of self are ultimately fragile. Nightmares represent the unconscious (and perhaps more natural) aspects of Being that resurface and destabilise the cultivated notions of self. Subhataar warns that “nightmares are sent by who, or what, we really are, underneath. “Don’t forget where you come from,” the nightmare tells. “Don’t forget your true self”” (ND 90). This idea recurs on a planetary scale in the novel, with the subdued environment reasserting itself over the tyranny of urbanisation. For instance, if the language of mountains is indeed rain (as the title of the penultimate chapter implies), then the conclusion of number9dream – the fierce typhoon and its connection to the earthquake in Tokyo – symbolises the earth reasserting its power. There are several instances in the novel wherein Mitchell challenges postmodern society by interrupting the narrative with a reminder of human vulnerability to nature. In “Video Games”, Eiji is walking down a street when an earthquake strikes. During the impact of the earthquake, “the whole city and I hurl up shining prayers to anyone – anyone – God, gods, kami, ancestors – who might be listening: stop this stop this stop this now” (ND 141). The appeal to the supernatural at such a moment reinforces human helplessness. The idea that man dominates the biosphere (as put forth by the notion of the Anthropocene) comes under challenge in these earthquake scenes, which re-contextualise the individual as a constituent, not master, of an ecosystem. The earthquake is thus a nightmarish reminder of the power of the earth to sustain and destroy life.

The critique of urbanisation, concomitant with Eiji’s reverence for, and identification with, nature, contributes to the novel’s postmodern planetary ethos. Mitchell once again echoes Roszak’s complaint that nature is wrongfully subordinated to the level of resource under contemporary society’s “scientific reality principle”. There is a clear association within the novel between late capitalism and ecological destruction. Eiji’s regard for the spiritual power of nature, and for the power of nature to destroy civilisation, challenges the reality principle that authorises the degradation and exploitation of the planet.

The metanarrative of time (and history) as chronologically ordered is similarly challenged throughout the novel. The aforementioned opposition between rural and urban is reflected in different senses of time. Timekeeping itself is characterised in the novel as a product of late capitalism. In an urban setting, time is manufactured. Eiji never straightforwardly states the time, referring rather to the source of timekeeping. He consults his “Zax Omega watch and [finds] that nearly three hours have passed”, or notes that “Fujifilm says 01:49” (ND 79, 48). The commercialisation of time is implicit in the association of brand with timekeeping. In the first chapter, the crowds of “drones”, as Eiji calls them, depart the Jupiter Café, thereby signifying the end of lunch hour. Eiji presumes that “they are afraid they’ll get restructured if one o’clock finds them anywhere but their striplit cubicles” (ND 4). Rose Harris-Birtill identifies the term “drones” as one used by Bentham to describe “the prisoners of lowest utilitarian value” which “reflects their identical treatment within his panoptical schemata”.242 The workers are clearly dehumanised and homogenised by their work. Time-keeping is a tool that enforces control and the subjugation of the “drones” in a capitalistic system, and the case of Mr Aoyama represents the sinister aspects of this kind of capitalist domination. Mr Aoyama kills himself after he is demoted, yet Eiji articulates his fate in terms of time, reflecting that Aoyama “ran out of minutes, so he jumped” (ND 90). Eiji reflects upon the nature of time, and his conclusion is semiotic: “When is six o’clock relative to now? Hours need other hours to make any sense at all” (ND 214). The experience of the passage of time, despite the capitalist imposition of twenty-four hour time, is in reality less orderly. Eiji’s sleepless night feels slow-paced yet passes quickly and unexpectedly as “a single night is stuffed with minutes, but they leak out, one by one” (ND 53). In a rural context, time is related to cycles of nature. Yuzu Daimon explains to Eiji that “the old poet-monks used to know what week of what month it was, just by the colour and the sheen of dragonflies’ – whatd’yacall’em? – fuselages” (ND 230).

In the penultimate chapter of the novel, Eiji is driven past the site of Subaru’s last kai ten voyage. He ponders the mechanics of time in reality and in his dreams:

If binoculars were powerful enough to bring the 1940s into focus, we could wave at one another. Maybe I will dream him, too. Time may be what prevents everything from happening at the same time in waking reality, but the rules are different in dreams. (ND400) Eiji’s dreams, as well as number9dream itself, exemplify what Wai-Chee Dimmock has described as “temporal hybridity”. By interlacing the novel with memories, stories, and Subaru’s journal, the experience of the present is commingled with the past. The synchronicity of time in Eiji’s dreams reflects this capacity of the past to come into contact with, and impact the nature of, the present and the future. Furthermore, the

242 Rose Harris-Birtill, “‘A Row of Screaming Dolls’: Escaping the Panopticon in David Mitchell’s number9dream”, 63. consistent destabilisation of reality in number9dream provokes the consideration that the “reality” of the novel follows the rules of dreams, in which “[. . .] the yet-to-be, the once-were, the will-never-be may walk amid the still-are” (ND 394).

Early in the novel, Eiji observes a man crossing and recrossing Omekaido Avenue. The man completes “one, two, three circuits” and Eiji wonders if he is “a private detective, a bioborg, a lunatic?” (ND 23-24). It is implied later, however, that the man walking in circles outside the Jupiter Café is, anachronistically, Eiji himself:

I cross over Omekaido Avenue [. . .] and I wait for the man to turn green. Then I cross back over Kita Street – I feel sad that I found what I searched for, but no longer want what I found. I wait, and cross back over Omekaido Avenue. I feel release. I complete one, two, three circuits. I can go now. (ND 375)243 The capitalist attempts to regulate and compartmentalise time are challenged by the novel’s cyclical timelines. This notion of eternal recurrence – a central theme in the later novel, Cloud Atlas – is detectable not only in the parameters of number9dream, but also in the structure of individual chapters. The second chapter, entitled “Lost Property”, is framed with memories of Anju; “Video Games” opens and concludes with vignettes from Eiji’s game of Zax Omega; the events of “Reclaimed Land” are prefaced (and culminate) with the passage in which Eiji faces Subhataar, expecting to die; “Study of Tales” begins with Goatwriter and concludes with the suggestion that his story is to be written imminently; the plotline of “Kai Ten”, including the extracts of Subaru Tsukiyama’s journal, are bookended with scenes in which Eiji meets members of his father’s family in the Amadeus Tea Room. The major plotline of the novel thus traverses the beginnings and endings of subplots. Mitchell subverts the chronological order of beginnings and endings at several points in the novel. Eiji’s purported sighting of himself at Omekaido Avenue unites the beginning and end of his quest for his father, symbolised in his circuitous pacing. In his description of ripples in a puddle, the kai ten pilot Kusakabe accounts for the mechanics of time in number9dream: “circles are born, while circles born a second ago live. Circles live, while circles living a second ago die. Circles die, while new circles are born” (ND 287). The cliff-hanger conclusion of “The Language of Mountains of Rain”, and effectively of number9dream itself, suggests the potential for a new beginning. In Eiji’s dream of John Lennon, he is informed that “the

243 This scene of Eiji watching himself recalls the episode in Ghostwritten in which Alfred Kopf follows himself in a circle. Unlike Alfred, Eiji does not recognise himself, and is spared the angst of such an encounter. ninth dream begins after ending” (ND 398). Thus the last pages of the novel that comprise the blank chapter “Nine”, offer a simultaneous ending and beginning. Eiji is once again journeying from Yakushima to Tokyo to find someone closely connected to him. One could reread the novel immediately and, in a similar fashion to Ghostwritten, there is a sense that the narrative trajectory is cyclical. The penultimate chapter, “The Language of Mountains is Rain”, depicts Eiji beginning a journey to Tokyo, whereas the opening chapter, “Panopticon”, shows him just after he has arrived in the city. The cyclical timeline is far more discernible to the reader than to Eiji, who is not only in medias res, but in the middle of a disorientating urban jungle.

The postmodern subject is characterised by fragmentation and disconnection with the past. Eiji’s quest to find his father (his origins) is an attempt to rewrite his past with a new narrative. Eiji defines his quest as a fulfilment of his and Anju’s greatest desire, and in pursuing this end he hopes to assuage his guilt over Anju’s passing. Dasein is temporally constituted (as I discussed in the previous chapter), and Eiji’s personality and desires are based upon the tragedies and trials of his past. His coming-of-age narrative is essentially a journey from a position of denial about his past to an ongoing acceptance. The spectre of Anju haunts his interpretation of every new experience, and Jonathan Boulter argues that Eiji becomes an archive, insofar as “mourning creates the subject as archive; to be a subject, in other words, is to be not only the subject of mourning, subject to mourning, but, perhaps, is to be mourning itself”.244 Consequently, Eiji approaches the world not merely through the lens of hyperrealism, but also in constant relation to the past. Eiji consciously and subconsciously transposes Anju upon himself, Ai, his half-sister, Zizzi Hikaru, and, according to Kathryn Simpson, Yuzu Daimon (ND 66). In a dream, Eiji amalgamates Ai and Anju by transposing Ai’s medical condition onto his sister - “Anju airs her recently acquired sigh. ‘Diabetes, genius, remember?’” (ND 386). When playing a video game, Eiji misconstrues Zizzi’s plea as emanating from his twin, “‘Zax,’ begs my sister, ‘don’t leave me here – insert a coin to continue.’” (ND 98). He labels his estranged half-sister an “anti-Anju” and recalls Anju referring to himself as “a boy-me” (ND 322, 57). Simpson and Peter Childs identify the word-play that reinforces these connections – “Ai Anju” as in “I and you”, “Yuzu” as “a kind of alter ego/double for Eiji himself as his name ‘you/zu’ suggests”.245

244 Jonathon Boulter, Melancholy and the Archive: Trauma, History and Memory in the Contemporary Novel, 117. 245 Peter Childs and James Green, Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels, 66. Whilst memory and nostalgia permeate the novel, it is the mode of perception that is foregrounded in “Lost Property”, and Simpson notes that Eiji’s preoccupation with the memories of his twin indicate that “Anju is a part or ‘property’ of him that he has physically lost forever, but who remains an important emotional and psychological prop to his sense of self”.246

The “picture lady” exemplifies the importance of the past to a sense of Being. During his duties as an attendee at the Lost Property Office at Ueno Station, an aged woman asks Eiji for her missing photographs, remarking that she “got the old ones back” but she “ain’t got the new ones back” (ND 61). Mrs Sasaki, Eiji’s supervisor, explains that the pictures are in fact the woman’s memories and observes that “all we are is our memories” (ND 62). The woman (clearly suffering from a mental illness), expresses the need to “cover up the clocks” (ND 62). Jameson argues that late capitalism causes “a shrinking of contemporary (bourgeois) experience such that we begin to live a perpetual present with a diminishing sense of temporal or indeed phenomenological continuities”.247 The picture lady’s desire to cover up the clocks and find her memories suggests that her postmodern state – the “perpetual presents” of late capitalism – is intolerable.

In the penultimate chapter, Eiji recalls an old daydream, in which he imagined that “there lived somewhere, in an advertland house and family, the Real Eiji Miyake. He dreamed of me every night. And that was who I really was – a dream of the Real Eiji Miyake” (ND 407). The novel’s insistence upon the blurred boundaries between real and the unreal, waking and dreams, perpetuates the process of self-discovery as it denies legitimation for a fixed, absolute conception of identity. The question forever remains, who is the Real Eiji Miyake, and furthermore, where is the Real Eiji Miyake? For any concept of “Japan” or “Tokyo” is similarly subject to doubt and revision as its cultural image is mediated by Japanese and global citizens alike. Indeed, the novel concludes with a report of a catastrophic earthquake in Tokyo, begging the question of whether “Tokyo”, whatever the word signifies, continues to exist. Eiji only discovers the harmony foretold by John Lennon by rescinding his belief in traditional narratives of ontology and generic expectations produced by the hyperreal. This is signified in his eventual reconciliation with his mother – a symbolic revision of his quest for the father.

246 Kathryn Simpson, “Coming of Age in number9dream,” 63. 247 Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism, 28. The reconciliation itself is contingent upon a rejection of hyperreal notions of what a mother or son should be: “I agreed to not judge her against a “Mother” standard, and she agreed not to compare me to a “Son” standard” (ND 399). The shedding of fixed roles, or hyperreal ideals of identity, permits Eiji to engage with his mother and see her as a “real person…a real woman” (ND 399).

It is apparent, therefore, that the novel embraces a Jamesonian critique of late capitalism, and the hyperreal culture it generates. The spectacle of “advertland” and its perceived desirability has insidious ramifications for identity. It produces a sense of lack that it purports to fulfil, be it the lack of an idealised family, lack of wealth, lack of personal desirability, or the lack of meaning. Furthermore, “advertland” and the various proponents of the hyperreal distort and obviate reality, protecting exploiters (such as the Yakuza), and denigrating the earth to the status of a resource. Number9dream challenges the legitimacy of the hyperreal by presenting many modes of perception and reality – panopticism, memory, virtual reality, genre, storytelling, memoir, chance and dreams. The foregrounding of perception as a condition of any kind of reality, reinforces the postmodern position that all truth is provisional, and all meaning determined through the eyes of the beholder. Number9dream, much like Ghostwritten, takes postmodern culture as its subject, exploring and critiquing the effects of late capitalism on being. Postmodernism confines and fragments the individual, preventing him or her from embracing the temporal and spatial constituents of their identity. Eiji seeks harmony outside the postmodern system – the ninth dream, as it were – and the novel simultaneously implies that such a reality exists while acknowledging the overwhelming influence of the hyperreal. number9dream exhibits aesthetic features of the postmodern - from metafiction, pastiche, the juxtaposition of high and low forms, a schizophrenic structure featuring different genres, and a pervasive (and ultimately unanswered) existential questioning of identity and truth. The novel does not, however, fully accede to a nihilistic vision of the future. Eiji’s character journey, whilst still very much in-process, reflects a more harmonious acceptance of his past and how that defines him. The planetary concern of climate change comes to the fore over the course of the novel, and the inconclusive ending of number9dream challenges the reader to contemplate both Eiji’s crisis and the ongoing environmental crisis that threatens human existence.

“History Admits No Outcomes”: Metafiction and the Future of the Planet in Cloud Atlas

“We are only what we know” – Sonmi248

The question of whether there can be originality in works of art is deftly answered by Timothy Cavendish, the publisher from Ghostwritten who comes to the fore as a central character in Mitchell’s third novel, Cloud Atlas. Cavendish imagines the following exchange with a deceased literary critic:

(The Ghost of Sir Felix Finch whines, ‘But it’s been done a hundred times before!’ – as if there could be anything not done a hundred thousand times between Aristophanes and Andrew Void- Webber! As if Art is the What, not the How!). (CA 373) The “How” of Cloud Atlas is of vital significance, not merely for the critical attention it has received from readers around the world, but because the novel’s innovative form disrupts and appears to subvert the subject matter of the stories it conveys. The majority of scholarship written about Mitchell has been devoted to Cloud Atlas, and this remains the work with which each of his other novels is generally compared. Published in 2004, the novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, became a bestseller, and was eventually adapted for film by Tom Twyker and Lana and Lilly Wachowski.249 Analyses of Cloud Atlas often concentrate upon the philosophical positions represented in the novel and its distinctive blending of genres. Critics have been divided as to whether Cloud Atlas can be more properly categorised as a cosmopolitan or a postmodern work, and whether the bleak future depicted in the novel is inevitable. In an interview for Writers Talk, Mitchell declared that “Identifying my own taxonomical position within a literary tradition […] has no appeal to me”.250 This assertion of indifference suggests that attempting to “pigeonhole” his work into a genre or political movement is perhaps fruitless. The primary task of this thesis has been to identify the

248 David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas, (London: Sceptre, 2004), 217. Further references to this edition will be included in the text in parentheses with the acronym “CA”. 249 The three directors are responsible for different sections of the film. Twyker directed the adaptation of “Letters from Zedelghem”, “The Ghastly Ordeal”, and “Half Lives”; Lana and Lily Wachowski directed “The Pacific Journal”, “An Orison of Sonmi-451”, and “Sloosha’s Crossin’”. The Wachowskis then edited all sections into a final cut of the film. 250 Leigh Wilson, “David Mitchell”. In Writers Talk: Conversations with Contemporary British Novelists, (ed.) by Philip Tew, Fiona Tolan and Leigh Wilson, (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008), 90. postmodern elements of Mitchell’s novels and how he manages to reconcile a postmodern approach with a vision of the planetary. Implicit in my task is the presumption that Mitchell’s fiction ventures beyond the agreed-upon characteristics of the postmodern. In other words, Mitchell’s work requires new definitions rather than old categories.

In the ensuing discussion of Cloud Atlas, I consider how Mitchell engages with different models of time, and how these conceptions of time (and therefore of history) are reframed as narrative. The novel’s fascination with the construction of narratives (and the power of those narratives to shape human identity) can be deduced from the pervasive presence of metafictional elements throughout the novel. Cloud Atlas features myriad intertextual allusions, pastiching literary works, as well as periodically acknowledging its own artifice as a narrative informed by literary conventions. The sustained interest in narrative forms is connected to the political concerns of the novel, which presents a series of crises in humanity, culminating in an environmental apocalypse. The novel poses a fundamental question: whether humanity is doomed to perpetuate the pattern of predacity and exploitation it has exhibited over the course of history, or whether humans have the agency (and therefore the responsibility) to control the evolution of civilisation in the future. I argue that the novel ultimately goes beyond this classic dilemma of free will versus inexorable fate (explored in Ghostwritten), and examines how our narratives of the past and the future (which either affirm human agency or concede the inevitability of fate), ultimately inform action taken in the present. It is the constraints of these narratives that Cloud Atlas attempts to expose, rather than validating any one hypothesis of human destiny.

All analyses of Cloud Atlas published to date have referred to the novel’s idiosyncratic structure as the arbiter (or disruptor) of the novel’s overall message. Given the centrality of the structure to any interpretation of the novel, the first task of this chapter is to discuss the structure and the various readings of this in scholarship on Mitchell. The structure has been interpreted as either affirming or undermining a linear conception of time, the moral agency of humanity, interconnectivity between people across space and history, and the stability of an objective reality. Furthermore – and this forms the crux of my analysis – the foregrounding of the novel’s structure necessarily privileges the role of narrative itself. The narrative complexity of Cloud Atlas resists simple synopsis. The novel comprises six discrete stories set at different points in history (and in the future) and representing a range of different genres of literature. As Sarah Dillon has observed, the structure of the novel is “palindromic”.251 The novel begins with the first half of the first narrative (“The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing”) which is set in the mid-nineteenth century and is chronologically the earliest piece. The narrative then cuts directly to the first half of the second narrative and so forth, until the sixth and final story – set in a post-apocalyptic future – appears in complete form in the centre of the book. The novel then reverses the pattern, going backwards in time with the concluding half of the other five narratives, ending with “The Pacific Journal”. Each story has a distinctive narrative voice and its own historical and geographic setting, albeit with a principal focus on the United States: three of the six protagonists are American, two stories are set in Hawaii (one in the mid-nineteenth century, the other in an imagined future) and one story is set in and around San Francisco in the 1970s. The stories are connected in many indirect ways, but most demonstrably in the recurring emphasis in the novel on the practice of reading. Each protagonist reads, views, or listens to the story that precedes their own narrative, which in turn impacts upon his/her own subsequent actions.

The plotlines of each chapter are informed by genre as well as the themes of the story that precedes it. In “Sloosha’s Crossin’ and Ev’rythin’ After”, a piece of post- apocalyptic science fiction set in Hawaii, the protagonist Zachry relies on his faith in the legendary Sonmi to guide his actions. In the preceding story, this same Sonmi is a clone, or “fabricant”, whose narrative typifies dystopian science-fiction. Sonmi is inspired to campaign against the slavery of the fabricants after watching a film version of the memoir “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish”. Cavendish, a London- based publisher who has been wrongfully confined to a nursing home in Hull, is distracted from (and thereby endures) his ordeal by reading an unsolicited manuscript entitled “Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery”. The airport-thriller style manuscript features a journalist, Luisa Rey, who is encouraged to continue her exposé of the sinister American megacorporation “Seaboard” after she surreptitiously removes the British composer Robert Frobisher’s letters from the corpse of the assassinated Seaboard scientist Rufus Sixsmith. Decades earlier, Frobisher had been Sixsmith’s lover, and his narrative recalls the novelistic style of Evelyn Waugh and other writers of the early Modernist period. In an attempt to escape his creditors, Frobisher ingratiates

251 Sarah Dillon, “Introducing David Mitchell’s Universe: A Twenty-First Century House of Fiction, 10. himself into the household of the esteemed but evidently declining composer Vyvyan Ayres, assuming the role of an amanuensis. Frobisher’s mutually exploitative relationship with Ayres, who appropriates his amanuensis’ own compositions, resonates with what Frobisher interprets as a parasitic relationship when he reads “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing”, which in turn resembles a sea-faring adventure of the kind written by Herman Melville. Ewing befriends a doctor named Henry Goose at the very beginning of journal, and soon after their meeting Goose purposefully misdiagnoses Ewing with “Gusano Coco Cervello”, a parasitical Polynesian worm that resides in the brain (CA 36). He then proceeds to treat Ewing with “medicine” for the worm, when in truth he is slowly poisoning Ewing in the hope of stealing his valued possessions once the young man is dead. Goose repeats the mantra “The Weak are Meat the Strong do Eat”, establishing the symbolic link between exploitation and cannibalism that recurs throughout the novel (CA 3, 524). Each narrative is thus similar in theme, yet distinctively different according to setting and genre.

As I discussed in the first chapter of this thesis, the structure of Cloud Atlas was inspired by Italo Calvino’s postmodern novel, If On A Winter’s Night a Traveller. Calvino’s novel epitomises the “schizophrenic” structuring that Jameson identifies as a central stylistic feature of the postmodern novel. By withholding the resolution to each narrative, Calvino is arguably affirming the postmodern resistance to totalising metanarratives of truth. Cloud Atlas, as I previously mentioned, both provokes and assuages the frustration which the reader may experience when reading books such as Calvino’s. This raises questions about Mitchell’s position in relation to postmodernism as, by concluding the six nesting stories he appears to offer an affirmation of textual meaning. The trajectory of the novel is like a boomerang that moves out to the future and sweeps back to the original point of reference (in this case, “The Pacific Journal”). Paul Harris has argued that both the structure of Cloud Atlas and the “macronovel” that is Mitchell’s entire oeuvre are reminiscent of the work of Jorge Luis Borges as, “Like Borges, Mitchell builds labyrinths composed in and out of time as well as space”.252 Harris nevertheless differentiates between the two authors, arguing that:

[…] Borges’ labyrinths are multicursal mazes of “forking time” and infinite possible worlds, whereas Mitchell’s uberbook maps out

252 Paul Harris, “Introduction: David Mitchell in the Labyrinth of Time,” 4. a unicursal labyrinth, a linear path whose twists and turns generate a nonlinear, topologically embedded time.253 Jason Mezey has likened the narrative of Cloud Atlas to the “push/pop” telephonic system, where one narrative (phone call) is “popped” and the next is “pushed” in its place.254 This conceptualisation of the structure as “push/pop” speaks to the postmodern fragmentation of narratives; the “schizophrenia” of the postmodern era as lamented by Jameson, as the individual is no longer sustained by one interaction but bombarded by many between which he or she must vacillate. Another conceptualisation of the structure that has been considered is the model of the matrioshka doll, or “the Russian- doll style embedding of each narrative”.255 The text itself overtly provides this metaphor. In the third narrative, “Half-Lives: A Luisa Rey Mystery”, the nuclear physicist Isaac Sachs ponders the nature of reality:

One model of time: an infinite matrioshka doll of painted moments, each ‘shell’ (the present) encased inside a nest of ‘shells’ (previous presents) I call the actual past but which we perceive as the virtual past. The doll of ‘now’ likewise encases a nest of presents yet to be, which I call the actual future but which we perceive as the virtual future. (CA 409) The setting of the fourth chapter, “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish”, is contemporaneous with the time of Cloud Atlas’s publication. Mitchell does not, however, situate this chapter as the anchor from which the past and the future are perceived. Rather, the reader is confronted with a series of shells written in their own present moment. The abrupt suspension of five of the six narratives disrupts the immediacy of the depicted events, converting them to “previous presents” and eventually “future presents”. In other words, the novel’s nonlinear structure challenges traditional notions of continuity (corresponding with Jameson’s idea of the “perpetual present” of postmodern life). By situating every narrative in the “present” rather than the past or the future, Mitchell brings into close proximity human activities (such as producing nuclear power) and their future consequences (the devastation of the planet after a nuclear meltdown).

253 Ibid. 254 Jason Howard Mezey, “‘A Multitude of Drops’: Recursion and Globalization in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas,” 14. 255 Courtney Hopf, “Discursive Identity through Narrative Form in Cloud Atlas,” 110. In the second chapter, “Letters from Zedelghem”, the musician Robert Frobisher composes a piece which is evidently another example of self-reflexive commentary on the novel’s structure. This piece – Cloud Atlas Sextet – is created by Frobisher’s

[…] reworking my year’s fragments into a ‘sextet for overlapping soloists’: piano, clarinet, ’cello, flute, oboe and violin, each in its own language of key, scale and colour. In the 1st set, each solo is interrupted by its successor: in the 2nd, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? (CA 463) Frobisher’s reference to interrupted soloists preserves the sense of the individual (like the matrioshka doll) amidst the whole. The theme is reprised by each instrument, explored according to the peculiarities and limitations of that instrument (arguably analogous to the way Mitchell communicates the same theme through different genres).

The image of the ouroboros, a snake or dragon that eats its own tail, recurs throughout Mitchell’s oeuvre in a number of forms and the structure is another incarnation of this image. The theme of auto-anthropophagy is crucial to Mitchell’s environmental and political concerns as well as in his discussion of fiction and ontology. Finally, the structure creates connections between the characters, and the protagonists of each story bear a comet-shaped birthmark, Mitchell scholars have speculated as to whether these characters are specific reincarnations of the same soul, as each matrioshka doll might be perceived as an avatar (with some variation) of the doll inside it.256 Mitchell stated in 2007 that:

Well, literally, all of the characters, except one, are reincarnations of the same soul in different bodies throughout the novel, identified by a birthmark, which is an old conceit from Chinese literature. I guess that’s just a symbol, really, of the universality of human nature.257 The film adaptation of Cloud Atlas strongly suggests that not only the protagonists, but also other minor characters, are reincarnations of the same soul. By casting a number of actors in multiple roles, the film version of Cloud Atlas does propose a model of reincarnation more akin to that in Hinduism, and the notion of the eternal soul

256 Bertholde Schoene, The Cosmopolitan Novel, 116. Caroline Edwards, “‘Strange Transactions’: Utopia, Transmigration and Time in Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas”. In David Mitchell: Critical Essays, (ed.) Sarah Dillon (Canterbury: Gylphi Limited, 2011), 190. 257 Mitchell stated this on BBC Radio (in response to an audience member’s question). Cited in Scott Dimovitz, “The Sound of Silence: Eschatology and the Limits of the Word in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas,” 80. (atman).258 I would suggest that Mitchell’s representation of reincarnation is closer to a Buddhist conceptualisation of reincarnation, in which there is no discrete sense of “soul”, but rather the continuation of karmic energy (impermanence being the fundamental fact of existence). This conjecture is based on Mitchell’s particular interest in Buddhism which is conveyed throughout his oeuvre (evidenced in Ghostwritten, number9dream, and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet), as well as the tendency of his fiction to question the very concept of a discrete sense of self. Each narrative, like each doll, can be considered as complete without reference to the other narratives or dolls. Cloud Atlas is, nevertheless, equally concerned with the various individuals’ narratives, and how these narratives are formed by, and contribute to, planetary history.

The leitmotif of reincarnation and the temporal structuring of the novel provoke a reappraisal of the ordering of time. The nature of time is a critical theme in Cloud Atlas, and there have been a number of interpretations of how temporality works in the novel and what that means for the overall “message” of the novel. Three models of time in Cloud Atlas have been identified by Patrick O’Donnell: cyclical time, linear time, and a “concertina” model of time.259 Time passes in a linear fashion for the first half of the novel, albeit with breaks in continuity as the focus shifts from narrative to narrative. The novel plots a journey from Adam Ewing (his name a metafictional reference to the mythical first man) to Zachry – a literal, linear transition from A to Z. The association between a linear conception of time and the notion of progress is challenged, however, by the novel’s depiction of the development of civilisations of the past and the projected developments of the future. As Gerd Bayer argues, Cloud Atlas “[…] takes aim at one of the central pillars of the utopian mode: its trust in the reality of time and the benefits of temporality”.260 Mitchell invokes the image of Utopia without its customary association with linear progression.

Utopic societies appear on two other occasions in the novel. At one point Sonmi retreats to a monastery that operates illegally, outside the consumer-system of Nea So Copros.

258 Cloud Atlas, directed by Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski, Tom Twyker, (2012; Warner Bros. Entertainment Australia, 2013), DVD. The film implies that the characters are reincarnations of the same soul by casting actors in several roles across the film’s timeline. Tom Hanks, for example, plays the parts of Dr Henry Goose, Isaac Sachs, Dermot Hoggins, and Zachry, respectively. Ben Whishaw, Jim Broadbent, Halle Berry, Doona Bae, Hugh Grant, James D’arcy, and Hugo Weaving also perform in multiple roles. 259 Patrick O’Donnell, A Temporary Future: The Fiction of David Mitchell, 96. 260 Gerd Bayer, “Perpetual Apocalypses: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and the Absence of Time”, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 56, no. 4 (2015), 345. The commune is a relatively peaceful, cooperative venture, despite the hardship of winter and the changing climate. Sonmi acknowledges that “It was no bucolic Utopia […] Yes, the colonists bicker and grieve as people will. But they do it in a community. Nea So Copros has no communities; it only has the state’” (CA 347). Oliver Lindner observes that this society “[…] is led by a woman, which contrasts with the patriarchal structure of power hierarchies in the other stories of the novel and which also foreshadows the leadership of the Abbess in the final narrative”.261 As Lindner suggests, the third Utopia of Cloud Atlas materialises in the community of the Valleysmen of “Big I” in the sixth and central narrative. In a similar vein to Moriori spiritualism, the Valleysmen believe that “[…] if you b’haved savage-like an’ selfy an’ spurned the civ’lize, or if Georgie [the Valleysmen’s concept of a devil] tempted you into barb’rism an’ all, then your soul got heavy’n’jagged an’ weighed with stones” (CA 255). Utopia is not characterised by temporal and technological progression, but a return to pastoral, communal living. Caroline Edwards posits that Mitchell’s aim is to “[deconstruct] the totalitarian utopia”.262 The two narratives of Cloud Atlas set in the future are recognizable as dystopian literature, as fiction critiquing the “totalitarian utopia”. As Lindner observes in his discussion of the novel, “a post-human and totalitarian state, the collapse of the environment and, finally, retrogression to a new feudalistic society all belong to set-pieces of dystopian writing”.263 The utopias of the novel exhibit this critique of totalitarianism:

Sonmi’s post-bucolic microtopian community offers an alternative model of utopian collectivity that is directly opposed to totalitarian social engineering through its small scale, politically marginalized position, and its non-homogenous and internally contradictory nature.264 This qualified, contingent definition of Utopia suggests that progress in not necessarily assured merely by the linear passage of time. Jared Diamond makes a similar conclusion in his Pulitzer Prize winning monograph Guns, Germs, and Steel, and Mitchell has cited Diamond’s study as a significant influence on Cloud Atlas.265 Diamond investigates the conundrum of how civilisations develop, asking “Why did wealth and power become distributed as they now are, rather than in some other

261 Oliver Lindner, “Postmodernism and Dystopia: David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (2004),” 370. 262 Caroline Edwards, “Utopia, Transmigration and Time in Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas,” 180. 263 Oliver Lindner, “Postmodernism and Dystopia: David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (2004),” 368. 264 Caroline Edwards, “Utopia, Transmigration and Time in Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas,” 187. 265 David Mitchell, “Q&A: Book World Talks with David Mitchell”, way?”.266 He provides an environmental explanation for the development and domination of certain civilizations, and the subjugation of others. The decimation of the Moriori by the Maori in the mid-19th Century is alluded to in Guns, Germs, and Steel as a case study for the impact of environment on the development of certain societies. The Maori and the Moriori originate from the same Polynesian culture, yet the former colonised New Zealand, and the latter colonised the colder Chatham Islands. Diamond argues that the isolation of the Chathams and the necessity of a hunter-gatherer system forced the Moriori:

[…] to learn how to get along with each other. They did so by renouncing war, and they reduced potential conflicts from overpopulation by castrating some male infants. The result was a small, unwarlike population with simple technology and weapons, and without strong leadership or organization.267 Mitchell begins Cloud Atlas with an exposé of human predacity, drawing upon Diamond’s study of development and domination in the Chathams. Adam Ewing recounts in his journal the tale of the Moriori’s conquest by the Maori and expresses admiration for the pacifist ethos of their society, despite such values having rendered them incapable of resisting conquest. Ewing muses rhetorically: “Who can deny Old Rekohu lay closer to More’s Utopia than our States of Progress governed by war- hungry princelings in Versailles & Vienna, Washington & Westminster?” (CA 12). Cloud Atlas and Guns, Germs, and Steel share a demonstrable scepticism towards the rhetoric of “progress”. Diamond asserts that “I do not assume that industrialized states are “better” than hunter-gatherer tribes, or that the abandonment of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle for iron-based statehood represents “progress,” or that it has led to an increase in human happiness”.268 Mitchell’s novel likewise depicts the potential dangers of the compulsive development of technology and urbanisation. While Diamond eschews the privileging of “iron based” over “hunter-gatherer” states, his environmental explanation of history raises questions about determinism. Casey Shoop and Dermot Ryan argue that, similarly,

Mitchell’s novel turns on the central agon between deep evolutionary imperatives that seem to shape the characters within the novel’s many fictional worlds and certain countervailing

266 Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), 15. 267 Ibid., 56. 268 Ibid., 18. possibilities that suggest that human and post-human actors in these worlds might transhistorically determine the fate of our species and our planet.269 This “agon” is revisited in critical debate about the novel’s position vis-à-vis individual human agency. Lynda Ng suggests that Cloud Atlas does not offer much hope because, while “[…] each individual narrator in Cloud Atlas finds success in resisting and overcoming an act of subjugation, this falls short of being able to create a real and lasting disruption to the relentless process of capitalist propagation and its attendant symptoms of hegemony, avarice and inequality”.270 Roy Osamu Kamada discusses the nature of resistance in the “Orison of Sonmi-451” narrative, concluding that, “[…] in a cruel twist toward the end of this section, the whole act of resistance is revealed to be a Foucauldian plot that doesn’t allow any true resistance, as the whole revolutionary movement is revealed to be part of the larger culture’s plan to contain revolutionary elements in the society”.271 This question of agency and the “countervailing possibilities” for change culminate in the climax of “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After”. Zachry finds a sleeping Kona sentry, and is confronted with a choice – to kill him or let him remain asleep:

I knowed why I shudn’t kill this Kona. It’d not give the Valleys back to the Valleysmen. It’d stony my cussed soul. If I’d been rebirthed a Kona in this life he could be me an’ I’d be killin’ myself. If Adam’d been, say, adopted an’ made Kona, this’d be my brother I was killin’. Old Georgie wanted me to kill him. Weren’t these reasons ’nuff jus’ to leave him be an’ hushly creep away? Nay, I answered my en’my, an’ I stroked my blade thru his throat […] I knowed I’d be payin’ for it by’n’by but, like I said a while back, in our busted world the right thing ain’t always possible. (CA 316) Zachry thus defends his actions by deflecting blame onto a world in which progress and altruism are precluded by human predacity. His disquiet about killing the Kona is evidence that his choice was not inevitable. Nevertheless, Zachry chooses to exert mastery over the vulnerable, defying the logic of temporal progress.

269 Casey Shoop and Dermot Ryan, “‘Gravid with the Ancient Future’: Cloud Atlas and the Politics of Big History,” 93. 270 Lynda Ng, “Genre and the Nation in Contemporary: Remapping the Landscape after Globalisation,” 270. 271 Roy Osamu Kamada, “Monstrous citizenships: Coercion, submission, and the possibilities of resistance in Never Let Me Go and Cloud Atlas”. In Marina Levine (ed.), Monster Culture in the 21st Century: A Reader, (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 171. The purported connection between characters via reincarnation is suggestive of cyclical time. In the Buddhist tradition, samsara (the cycle of rebirth) is regarded as the perpetuation of suffering, and enlightenment is salvation from the inevitable suffering concomitant with existence itself. The narratives that comprise Cloud Atlas are characterised by the recurring dynamic of the “struggle between the exploited and the exploiter”.272 The vision of the future in “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After” implies that human society persistently engages with this struggle, and in the concluding pages of the novel Ewing asks the question “Is this the entropy written within our nature?” (CA 528). Heather J. Hicks has considered Ewing’s ultimately hopeful speech in the context of the novel’s engagement with cyclical time, asking whether “such an understanding of time simply [would not] calcify the brutality of humanity has shown itself capable of, rather than opening the way for positive change?”273 She nevertheless argues that a cyclical model of time permits a reprieve from what Mircea Eliade has termed “the ‘terror of history’”.274 The structure of Cloud Atlas, Hicks asserts, ensures that “the apocalyptic end of civilization becomes the occasion for the beginning of a new chapter or phase of each of the stories Mitchell had begun earlier”.275 The aforementioned utopian communities can be recreated inasmuch as violence and oppression are repeated throughout time. Having read Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence at the behest of Vyvyan Ayres, Frobisher writes, just before committing suicide, that:

We do not stay dead long. Once my Luger lets me go, my birth, next time around, will be upon me in a heartbeat. In thirteen years from now we’ll meet again at Gresham, ten years later I’ll be back in this same room, holding this same gun, composing this same letter, my resolution as perfect as my many-headed sextet. Such elegant certainties comfort me. (CA 490) Frobisher’s certainty defies the hope of an alternative future, yet Shoop, Ryan, and Mezey have argued that Cloud Atlas depicts the future as a return “with progress”.276 They emphasise that, “If we are surprised that Adam pledges himself to the Abolitionist

272 David Mitchell, “Q & A: Book World Talks With David Mitchell”. 273 Heather J. Hicks, “‘This Time Round’: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and the Apocalyptic Problem of Historicism,” 5. 274 Ibid., 3. 275 Ibid., 2. 276 Casey Shoop and Dermot Ryan, “‘Gravid with the Ancient Future’: Cloud Atlas and the Politics of Big History,” 100. Jason Howard Mezey, “‘A Multitude of Drops’: Recursion and Globalization in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas,”24. cause, […] we should note similar and equally significant acts of voluntary kindness propel the novel’s larger cosmic narrative”.277

The concept of “concertina time”, advanced by Patrick O’Donnell, derives from a metaphor offered by Timothy Cavendish: “Time, no arrow, no boomerang, but a concertina” (CA 370). O’Donnell argues that the repetition of scenarios in Cloud Atlas is symptomatic of these temporal compressions, rather than evidence of eternal recurrence. The echoed scenarios produce temporal hybridity, connecting the chapters (in addition to the connection produced by the metafictional emphasis on the acts of reading) without implying causality between the events of each narrative. The effect of this is to emphasise the interconnectedness of all people across the planetary stage of time and space.

At the beginning of this chapter, I identified the philosophical inquiry of Cloud Atlas pertaining to the tension between the idea of voluntary human agency and seemingly inexorable patterns of behaviour. The resolution of this quandary (whether the novel affirms the power of free will or fate) relies upon which model of time, if any, is ultimately privileged in the novel. Although few critics assert that Cloud Atlas privileges either fate or human agency, some do argue that Mitchell’s novel has a clear political orientation. Jo Alyson Parker’s interpretation of the novel is cautiously optimistic. She observes that:

Mitchell gives us a picture of a dystopian future, but it is embedded in a present in which a good man determines to help change the world for the better. The novel both offers the bleak vision of the future in the chronological ending and supplants it in the actual ending by suggesting a means for averting that future.278 Berthold Schoene proposes that Cloud Atlas is the exemplar of cosmopolitan fiction. I have argued in the first chapter of this thesis that the novel interrogates and critiques the ideals of cosmopolitanism, and is better considered as a treatise on the possibility of a cosmopolitan future, rather than an exemplar of cosmopolitan thinking.279 The political purpose of Cloud Atlas is, in my estimation, to exhort readers to recognize the dangers

277 Casey Shoop and Dermot Ryan, “‘Gravid with the Ancient Future’: Cloud Atlas and the Politics of Big History,” 101. Jason Howard Mezey, “‘A Multitude of Drops’: Recursion and Globalization in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas,” 30. 278 Jo Alyson Parker, “From Time’s Boomerang to Pointillist Mosaic: Translating Cloud Atlas into Film,” SubStance 44, no. 1 (2015), 132. 279 Kelly Frame, “Cloud Atlas: Cosmopolitan Exemplar or Critique?” New Scholar 4, no. 1 (2016), 25-36. of capitalism and to inspire outrage about the exploitation of people and the environment.

The novel is permeated with imagery of human and environmental exploitation, consumption and cannibalism, beginning with “The Pacific Journey”. Ewing observes, and eventually concedes, the damaging imprint that imperialism has left on the Chathams. The effects of trade on the Pacific environment and its people are unambiguously detrimental. The local ecosystem of the Chathams is disrupted by over- fishing, leading to the near-extinction of the seal population (the main source of food for the Moriori). Ewing explains that “Within a few years the seals were found only on the outer rocks & the ‘sealers’ too turned to farming potatoes, sheep & pig-rearing on such a scale that the Chathams are now dubbed ‘The Garden of the Pacific’” (CA 13). The landscape is transformed by European agricultural practices, colonised and homogenised as another “Garden” cultivated by Empire. The most prominent commodities of the region, nevertheless, are slaves. Ewing is confronted by the enslavement of the Moriori by the Maori, observing with distaste that “The slaves, duskier & sootier than their nut-brown masters & less than half their number, squatted in the mud. Such inbred, bovine torpor!” (CA 6). Ewing grows to respect the Moriori despite this initial prejudice, and eventually pledges himself to the Abolitionist movement. Another, unofficial form of slavery exists in the Chathams – the natives are compelled to harvest crops by “punitive incentives” (CA 499). The missionaries enforce the natives’ dependence on tobacco through the “Smoking School”: having cultivated the addiction, the settlers then demand strenuous labour in exchange for tobacco (CA 501). The enforced consumerism enacts what Adorno and Horkheimer have described as a “circle of manipulation and retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows stronger”.280 Ewing’s outrage is aroused when he sees the slave Autua being whipped. “The beaten savage raised his slumped head, found my eye & shone me a look of uncanny, amicable knowing!” (CA 6). Ewing does not interfere at this point, and only when he is once again confronted by Autua does he resolve to help him.

A similar scenario is enacted in the struggle between the major corporation Seaboard Inc. and the environmental protestors in “Half Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery”.

280 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, (New York: The Seabury Press, 1972), 121. Hester Van Zandt, an activist protesting against nuclear power, remonstrates on the difficulty of engendering outrage:

The conflict between corporations and activists is that of narcolepsy versus remembrance. The corporations have money, power and influence. Our sole weapon is public outrage. Outrage blocked the Yuccan Dam, ousted Nixon and, in part, terminated the monstrosities in Vietnam. But outrage is unwieldy to manufacture and handle. First, you need scrutiny; second, widespread awareness; only when this reaches a critical mass does public outrage explode into being. (CA 125) Curbing the power of corporations is not impossible, but evidently requires a large-scale collective response, a sense of social outrage which is most often garnered in reaction to an atrocity, rather than preventatively. The nuclear apocalypse preceding “Sloosha’s Crossin’” testifies to the lack of public outrage sufficient to quell the profit-based rationale for the development of unstable energy production. The CEO of Seaboard – Albert Grimaldi - is a caricature of villainy (like his hired gun, “Bill Smoke”), and his corruptive influence extends to the politician Lloyd Hooks, “the President’s ‘Energy Guru’” (CA 105). Hooks, somewhat hypocritically, refers to Grimaldi as “Greed on Two Legs”. This apparent allusion to George Orwell’s Animal Farm underscores the narrative’s concern with corruption. Grimaldi employs criminal and violent tactics to achieve his aim of securing the future of oil: the nuclear power plant has been designed to fail with disastrous consequences, thereby ensuring the world’s dependence on oil for fuel.

The fifth section of the novel, “An Orison of Sonmi-451”, offers Mitchell’s most concentrated critique of capitalism. The narrative is presented as an archivist’s interview with Sonmi-451, a clone who had been created to work in the fast-food restaurant “Papa Song’s”. The archivist is a government official whose task is to record the details of Sonmi’s failed insurrection prior to her execution. As is alluded to in the title of the narrative, Mitchell invokes many of the thematic concerns associated with classic science-fiction, drawing upon Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, and Nineteen-Eighty- Four, all of whose authors (Bradbury, Huxley and Orwell, respectively) Sonmi refers to as “optimists” (CA 220). Sonmi’s tale is, in part, an homage to dystopian literature, and particularly that of Orwell. “Corpocracy” (the government of Nea So Copros) resembles “INGSOC” in Orwell’s novel, and the elite in both novels manufacture rebellions in order to control and encourage conformity amongst their people.281 The state of Oceania controls its people through surveillance, fear of the enemy and fear of the Thought Police. The government of Nea So Copros (Unanimity) utilises these instruments of control, but what is more remarkable is the way in which the citizens of Nea So Copros are controlled via economic structures.

Mitchell challenges the normativity of everyday commercial enterprise by appropriating religious terminology to describe transactions and business structures. The Fabricants in the restaurant are “servers” managed by a “Seer”; they operate under “Catechisms” pronounced by their “Logoman”, Papa Song; and they ritualistically chant to Papa Song and genuflect by “[making] the sign of the dollar” (CA 187, 188, 190). Purebloods, otherwise known as “Consumers”, are distinct from Fabricants because they each possess a “Soul” – a micro-chip inserted into the tip of the finger that effectively holds their bank balance (CA 188). The sanctification of commerce in “An Orison of Sonmi” recalls the Marxist concept of religion as “the illusory happiness of the people”.282 Materialism, in this instance, is the illusory happiness of the people. The consumer is not free, being obliged to support the economic system through the spending of a mandated quota. The spectre of the “Smoking School” is evoked, as once again the individual is coerced to participate in the ostensibly “free” market. The spending quota is determined by consumers’ strata (in other words, class), and stratum is indicative of wealth. The correlation of Soul and wealth imbues the consumer with market value. This conceptualisation of the body-as-product for consumption is depicted in the confronting fate of superannuated fabricant workers:

A slaughterhouse production line opened out below us, manned by figures wielding scissors, swordsaws, tools I don’t know the names of...blood-soaked, from head to toe, like sadistic visions of hell. The devils down there snipped off collars, stripped clothes, shaved follicles, peeled skin, offcut hands and legs, sliced off meat, spooned organs [...]. (CA 359)

281 George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, (London: Penguin Books, 2008). Winston Smith is tricked by the Party into joining “the Brotherhood” - a non-existent rebel group fighting for freedom from totalitarianism. The Party goes to the extent of contriving “the Book”, which details the nature of the Party’s power and how it can be undermined. Sonmi is deceived into joining “Union”, a rebel group manipulated by Unanimity and she produces her “Declarations”. The aim of Unanimity is to discredit her and her book in order to stifle dissent, yet it is clear that her words live on and eventually (albeit in a distorted version) inspire the religion of the Valleysmen. 282 Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right”, (London: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 1. The harvested fabricants are then recycled into Papa Song’s food as well as the “wombtanks” which germinate new clones. Most grotesquely, however, harvested fabricant is considered the “most economic way to supply...protein” to other fabricants; thus they are distilled into liquid “soap”, the food source for Papa Song’s clones (CA 359, 189). This correlation between slavery and cannibalism recurs in “Sloosha’s Crossin’”, in which the Kona enslave the people from the Valleysmen in order to exploit their labour and consume their bodies.

The depiction of the oppression and exploitation of the fabricants can be read as a critique of the marginalisation of workers and labourers more generally. The extreme poor – migrant factory workers – in Nea So Copros live in the “untermensch” slums (CA 332). This condition is inescapable for, as Sonmi remarks, the subjugation of fabricants and untermensch is necessary for maintaining the economic climate, because rich “purebloods have lost the skills that build societies”, and production depends on cheap labour (CA 343). Sonmi’s analysis of the economic system as dependent on the exploitation of labour accords with the work of Pheng Cheah, a political theorist who is sceptical of global political institutions and corporations expounding a cosmopolitan ethos, because

[…] it is unlikely that this solidarity [amongst global entities] will be directed in a concerted manner towards ending economic inequality between countries because Northern civil societies derive their prodigious strength from this inequality.283 The story of Sonmi-451 suggests that the subjugation of workers is indeed perpetuated by a capitalistic system for economic purposes. In “Letters from Zedelghem”, the relationship between Frobisher and Vyvyan Ayrs is ultimately premised on the exploitation of the worker (in this case, Frobisher) by a powerful employer. Ayrs is able to exert control over Frobisher because he is protected by his wealth and the connections he has forged amongst the powerful. Unless Frobisher agrees to compose passages of music for the composition Eternal Recurrence, for which Ayrs intends to take full credit, Ayrs proposes to make public Frobisher’s affair with his wife, his bisexuality, and his financial woes:

Imagine the scandal! After everything Ayrs had done for Frobisher, too . . . well, no wealthy patron, no impoverished patron, no festival organizer, no board of governors, no parent whose Little Lucy

283 Pheng Cheah, “Cosmopolitanism,” 494. Lamb wants to learn the piano, will have anything, anything to do with you (CA 474). As the reader discovers in “Half Lives” that Frobisher’s Cloud Atlas Sextet has languished in obscurity for decades, Ayrs evidently carries out his threat. Symbolically, Frobisher’s tale is set in a country ravaged by the Great War. Frobisher converses with the minor character Morty Dhondt, who argues that another war is coming:

The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the fear of violence, or actual violence, is the instrument of this dreadful will…the nation state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous proportions. QED, nations are entities whose laws are written by violence. Thus it ever was, so ever shall it be. War, Robert, is one of humanity’s two eternal companions. (CA 462) Frobisher asks Dhondt about the other “eternal companion”, to which he cynically replies “Diamonds” (CA 462). This exchange underscores the conjunction of the pursuit of wealth and violence, and the crushing pressure of permanent insolvency (and therefore social exclusion) contributes to Frobisher’s own violent end.

“The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish” reflects upon the value of a person when they are no longer considered a useful cog in the economic machine. The reader is introduced to Cavendish in a scene in which he is assaulted by a group of teenage girls who beat him and steal his watch after he reproaches them for littering. He examines his wounded pride after the event, reflecting that:

It wasn’t the watch or even the bruises or the shock that had scarred me so. It was that I was a man who had once faced down and bested a quartet of Arab ragamuffins in Aden, but in the girls’ eyes I was . . . old, merely old. Not behaving the way an old man should – invisible, silent and scared – was, itself, sufficient provocation. (CA 174) The teenagers, whom Cavendish describes as “dressed like Prostitute Barbie”, recall to mind the “magazine girls” who visit Satoru’s shop in Ghostwritten (CA 147). The magazine girls reconstitute themselves in order to conform to simulacra of ideal beauty. Barbie’s figure bears no realistic relation to the anatomy of living women: she is mass produced, an exemplary image of late capitalism and hyperrealism. Cavendish’s ensuing tale of marginalisation and infantilism is prefaced by this altercation which reinforces the power of a capitalist system (the Barbies) and the place of the unproductive, limited consumer (the elderly) as silent and invisible. Cavendish is reminded at several junctures in his tale that “The world outside has no place for you”, and his friend Veronica posits that:

We – by whom I mean anyone over sixty – commit two offences just by existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk too slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts and drug barons of all stripes, but being slowed down, it cannot abide. Our second offence is being Everyman’s memento mori. The world can only get comfy in shiny-eyed denial if we are out of sight. (CA 376-7) Inability to operate in the frantic momentum of a capitalist system relegates the elderly to “uselessness” and therefore valuelessness. Furthermore, the materialism that is fostered by capitalism is challenged by death – a state in which the material is obsolete. The reminder of death – the memento mori – undermines the power of the commodity to satisfy human needs. Autua, Frobisher, Cavendish, Sonmi, and the slaves of the Kona are all examples of how a capitalist system attributes value to a person according to their instrumental potential as consumer and/or producer (or their inability to be either). Capitalism thus dehumanizes a person and reconstructs him or her as a utensil, furthermore reducing the environment to a mere resource.

If Cloud Atlas can be said to have a political message, it is one designed to foster the “outrage” prescribed by Hester Van Zandt. Cloud Atlas, much like Ghostwritten, is “writing back” to hegemonies of empire, sexuality, and gender. Mitchell chooses to privilege voices of the dispossessed by underscoring the plights of slaves, racial minorities, homosexuals, women, and the elderly. This retelling of history from marginalized perspectives produces a focus on the patterns of exploitation – the sources of outrage. It also brings to the fore the ways in which narratives of history and futurity are determined. Fredric Jameson’s analysis of Cloud Atlas brings together Mitchell’s two concerns of historicity and politics. He argues that the novel is a work of historical fiction, and that “[…] the philosophical question about future history and indeed about the future history of the planet itself is one which all true historical novels must raise today”.284 While Jameson proclaims that Mitchell’s novel exemplifies this new kind of “true historical novels”, he suggests that its ultimate aim is to “[fulfil] one of the great indispensable functions of ideological analysis: namely to show the contradictions in

284 Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism, 306. which we are ourselves imprisoned, the opposition beyond which we cannot think”.285 Jameson argues that, rather than demanding a choice between two contradictory visions of the future (and consequently two contending evaluations of human morality), Cloud Atlas exposes the problems of reducing the future to one of two fates (either apocalypse or the continued cycle of exploitation):

These alternatives are today and for the moment the only ways in which we can imagine our future, the future of late capitalism; and it is only by shattering their twin dominion that we might conceivably be able again to think politically and productively, to envisage a condition of genuine revolutionary difference, to begin once again to think Utopia.286 Jameson contends that humans are constrained by the narratives that they produce, a contention which draws attention back to the metafictional nature of Cloud Atlas. Cloud Atlas reflects the same preoccupation with the shifting borders between reality and fiction that characterised number9dream. The structure of Cloud Atlas produces a self- reflexive concern with textuality and readership. Irrespective of whether or not the protagonists are reincarnations of the same soul, as has been alluded to at the beginning of this chapter, the verifiable connective “glue” between each narrative is the shared act of reading. Interconnectedness – a vital motif in Cloud Atlas – is achieved by the consumption of texts, rather than through direct interaction. The actions and decisions of several characters are, in turn, tangentially influenced by the texts they consume. External narratives are adopted – consciously or unconsciously – by the characters, in much the same way as Eiji absorbs the hyperreal narratives of identity in number9dream. The indistinctness of the boundary between fiction and reality is compounded in Cloud Atlas by the fictional status of Luisa Rey as a character in a manuscript. This detail relegates the historical portion of the novel to the realm of fiction, as both Frobisher’s and Ewing’s tales are embedded in that manuscript. The comet-shaped birthmark that unites the protagonists is mocked by Cavendish:

One or two things will have to go: the insinuation that Luisa Rey is this Robert Frobisher chap reincarnated, for example. Far too hippie-druggy-new age. (I, too, have a birthmark, below my left armpit, but no lover ever compared it to a comet. Georgette nicknamed it Timbo’s Turd.) (CA 373)

285 Ibid., 308. 286 Ibid., 308-9. This self-reflexive comment on the literary device that connects different sections of the novel is not merely a gesture of ironic self-awareness on Mitchell’s part; rather, it draws attention to the contrived nature of the novel’s coherence. Such instances of metafiction preclude the presumption that Cloud Atlas is offering a metanarrative of the past and the future, rather than depicting the ways in which humans attempt to understand their lives through narrative. The constructedness of history and futurity is contemplated by Isaac Sachs, a scientist employed by Seaboard Inc, who is inspired by Luisa Rey to leak a report (written by Rufus Sixsmith, Frobisher’s former lover) that exposes the power plant’s flaws. Sachs considers the inaccessibility of the past: “The actual past is brittle, ever-dimming + ever more problematic to access + reconstruct: in contrast, the virtual past is malleable, ever-brightening + ever more difficult to circumvent/expose as fraudulent” (CA 408). The malleability of the virtual past enables totalising narratives (the antithesis of the postmodern), and Sachs notes that:

The present presses the virtual past into its own service, to lend credence to its mythologies + legitimacy to the imposition of will. Power seeks + is the right to ‘landscape’ the virtual past. (He who pays the historian calls the tune.) (CA 409) The ways in which humans historicise the past shape the projected narratives of the future, thus the perpetuation of a system is achieved and the imagining of an alternative future is constrained. Furthermore, as Sachs suggests, the virtual future we imagine “[…] may influence the actual future, as in a self-fulfilling prophecy, but the actual future will eclipse our virtual one as surely as tomorrow eclipses today” (CA 409). The power of the virtual future to influence our thinking is the danger identified by Jameson, as hypothetical projections curbs creative thought about how social reform, or Utopia, can be achieved. If I may refer to Sachs’ reverie one last time, he asks the question: “Is there a meaningful distinction between one simulacrum of smoke, mirrors + shadows – the actual past – from another such simulacrum – the actual future?” (CA 409). By compressing the past and the future into interchangeable simulacra, Sachs insinuates that historical narrative bears no relation to reality.287 The overtly metafictional devices of Cloud Atlas reinforce the idea that narratives, histories, prophecies are simulacra. According to such a reading, Mitchell is mobilising a postmodern literary technique – metafiction – to produce a sense of hope that the actual future can “eclipse” the

287 Heather J. Hicks, “‘This Time Round’: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and the Apocalyptic Problem of Historicism,” 3. metanarratives of futurity if the metanarratives of power and the past are duly interrogated.

The “how” of Cloud Atlas is once again a defining factor, as the novel produces a number of narratives of resistance that are tangentially linked, self-reflexive in regard to their own artificiality (and therefore not proclaiming a totalising veracity), but which testify to collective and diverse approaches to social reform. Adam Ewing unwittingly articulates the way in which the novel considers and tests different genre and narratives, when he asserts that there are:

As many truths as men. Occasionally, I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself, but as I approach, it bestirs itself & moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent. (CA 17) The loss of absolute truth or a grand narrative is not, however, lamented in the novel. Rather, the continued pursuit of the “truer Truth” amongst the many truths available is a way of resisting a totalizing system. The “schizophrenic” structuring of postmodern literature that Jameson critiques in Postmodernism or The Logic of Late Capitalism is reframed in such a way as to make an effective political and philosophical statement. Hicks argues that:

This deployment of literary/cultural archetypes and invocation of literary icons suggests that Cloud Atlas is less about how individuals can become historical agents in order to derail our momentum toward the apocalypse, than about how literary genres provide us archetypes to resist the “terror of history”.288 The characters are not connected merely to each other, or to Mitchell’s fictional “multiverse”, but also to a multitude of other texts. As has already been noted, Cloud Atlas is replete with intertextual allusion, Mitchell having explained the role of intertextuality in his fiction to me as follows: “It’s a metaphor bank, a simile bank, and shorthand for these things, our association with things that you can commandeer in your prose, and […] it makes the world more familiar to the reader”.289 The reader is connected to the world of Cloud Atlas in much the same way as the characters are connected to each other. The allusions in Mitchell’s fiction imbue his narratives with the themes, ambience, and philosophies of the texts to which he is referring. The

288 Heather J Hicks, “‘This Time Round’: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and the Apocalyptic Problem of Historicism,” 9. 289 David Mitchell, interview by Kelly Frame, 25 May 2015, Sydney. allusions also remind the reader of the artifice of the novel; of the instability of the novel’s reality. As previously mentioned, “The Pacific Journal” is profoundly influenced by the work of Herman Melville, and Cloud Atlas self-reflexively invokes this connection when Ewing refers to his account of the decline of the Moriori as “[holding] company with the pen of a Defoe or Melville” (CA 10).290 Cloud Atlas produces an image of humanity as being in a state of intimate interconnection. This state is similarly explored in Moby Dick, in which Captain Ahab laments his inability to function outside of an economic system of dependence, referring to his obligations to his employer as “that mortal inter-indebtedness”.291 Ishmael articulates the interconnectedness of humanity in Chapter 72, “The Monkey-Rope”, in which he and Queequeg work together to hook a recently slain whale and bring it aboard. Ishmael observes that “I seemed distinctly to perceive that my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of two: that my free will had received a mortal wound; and that another’s mistake or misfortune might plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster and death”.292 This interdependence, he acknowledges, is “the precise situation of every mortal that breathes; only, in most cases, he, one way or other, has this Siamese connexion with a plurality of other mortals”.293 Human life is consequently defined by the experience of this “plurality”, and both Mitchell and Melville depict human beings as interdependent constituents of a network that is both trans-spatial and trans-temporal.

The section entitled, “Letters from Zedelghem” was inspired by (and makes explicit reference to) Delius: As I Knew Him, the memoir of Eric Fenby, who was employed as an amanuensis to help the celebrated composer Fredric Delius arrange his music as his eyesight diminished. Mitchell has described Frobisher as “Fenby’s evil twin”, and has openly acknowledged the substantial correlations between the memoir and this section of Cloud Atlas.294 Mitchell has also cited Lions and Shadows by Christopher Isherwood as an influential text.295 Frobisher’s and Cavendish’s reflections on authenticity and

290 I have explored this particular instance of intertextuality in greater detail in my article “‘The Strong Do Eat’: David Mitchell and Herman Melville – a Study in Intertextuality”. Nevertheless, a few points warrant reiteration in this discussion of Cloud Atlas more generally. 291 Herman Melville, Moby Dick, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 482. 292 Ibid., 328. 293 Ibid., 328. 294 David Mitchell, “Q&A: Book World Talks with David Mitchell” 295 Ibid. originality in art can be traced to Isherwood’s autobiography.296 Frobisher’s devotion to music is heavily compromised by a desire for fame, respect, and the conceptualisation of the “artist” as a kind of elite. Isherwood recalls entertaining this perspective himself:

I suppose that what I, in my muddled way, was trying to do was to define the artist’s position in society – a legitimate and interesting theme. But as ‘society’, for me, still meant the peerage; and as I still imagined that ‘being an artist’ was a kind of neurotic alternative to being an ordinary human man, it is hardly surprising that my ideas got a little mixed.297 Frobisher ultimately eschews the desire for fame and social status, in favour of the spiritual uplift it can provide:

How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because if one didn’t the wolves and blizzards would be at one’s throat all the sooner. (CA 82) Frobisher’s desire for recognition in part derives from his feeling of inadequacy when he compares himself to his brother, Adrian, who died fighting in Belgium in the Great War. He concedes to Sixsmith that “I’ve often banged on to you about growing up in my legendary brother’s shadow – every rebuke began with an ‘Adrian never used to . . .’ Grew to hate the sound of his name” (CA 459). Isherwood complains of a similar sense of being overshadowed, observing that “we young writers of the middle ’twenties were all suffering, more or less subconsciously, from a feeling of shame that we hadn’t been old enough to take part in the European war”.298 Isherwood is suggesting that this very specific sense of shame – survivor’s guilt – is a common trope in literature written by young men from that period. Mitchell thus plays with the expectations produced by the genre of memoir, and the very formulaic or even clichéd aspects of his narratives are

296 Mitchell directly echoes Lions and Shadows in the scene of Cavendish’s escape from Aurora House in a stolen car. Cavendish and his friends Mr Meeks, Veronica, and Ernie are discovered at a pub by Aurora House’s manager (and tyrant) Nurse Noaks, the barbarous groundskeeper Withers and the heartless, money-grubbing son of a patient Johns Hotchkiss, who attempt to take them back to the nursing home. Mr Meeks, an elderly man who has only been capable of uttering the phrase “I know, I know” throughout the narrative, shocks his companions with an unexpected outburst: “The octogenarian leapt on to the bar, like Astaire in his prime, and roared this SOS to his universal fraternity, “Are there nor trrruuue Scortsmen in tha hooossse?” (CA 400). In Lions and Shadows, Isherwood recalls a tense situation in which a car (in which he was a passenger) was blocked by rioters during the Great Strike in London: “Things had begun to look ugly; and then Sandy had shouted, with his best accent: ‘Are there no Scotsmen here?’ And, at once, a dozen voices had answered: ‘Aye, laddie, we’re with ye.’” In Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows, (London: Vintage Books, 2013), 132. 297 Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows, 90. 298 Ibid., 51. deliberately placed to emphasise textuality. Mitchell’s debt to Isherwood is not simply stylistic, but rather the seeds of Cloud Atlas can be identified in Isherwood’s ruminations on novelistic structure, in which he evokes the metaphor of the ouroboros:

Therefore epics, I reasoned, should start in the middle and go backwards, then forwards again – so that the reader comes upon the dullness half-way through, when he is more interested in the characters; the fish holds its tail in its mouth, and time is circular, which sounds Einstein-ish and brilliantly modern.299 Isherwood continues by asking “But why should the narrative be continuous? Why not write the story in self-contained scenes, like a play; an epic in an album of snapshots?”300 “An epic in an album of snapshots” is a fitting description of Cloud Atlas, and Isherwood’s analogy of photography in relation to the novel form is significant. First, we should consider what Isherwood proposes is the effect of this album/novel structure:

In the first snapshot, we saw these people merely as casual acquaintances: here they are our intimate friends. With the eyes of friends, we look deeply into their faces, reading, in Time’s cipher, everything which is secretly written there. And this sends us back to the first snapshot. With how much interest we examine it now! Every attitude, every gesture, seems charged with meaning, with reference to things past, with presage of things to come. And so we go through our album once again. And again and again and again. There is no reason, theoretically, why you should ever stop reading this kind of book at all.301 Isherwood identifies the vital importance of the placement of snapshots, and how proximity to preceding and succeeding shots (or self-contained scenes) alters the reader’s interpretation of that moment. Isherwood regards the photographs as bearing “Time’s cipher”, anticipating the theory later put forward by Susan Sontag that “By slicing out this moment and freezing it...all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt”.302 Mitchell notably quotes this same statement in Black Swan Green.303

Mitchell has remarked in an interview that the post-apocalyptic oration “Sloosha’s Crossin’” in Cloud Atlas is modelled on Russell Hoban’s novel Riddley Walker.304 Key

299 Ibid., 225. 300 Ibid. 301 Ibid., 226. 302 Original quotation in Susan Sontag, On Photography, (Cornwall: Penguin Books Ltd, 2008), 15. 303 David Mitchell, Black Swan Green, (London: Sceptre, 2006), 299. 304 David Mitchell, “Q&A: Book World Talks with David Mitchell”. elements from “Sloosha’s Crossin’” are demonstrably indebted to Hoban, such as the post-nuclear setting; the fatherless hero; the primeval, tribal culture; the contrivance of a futuristic Pidgin English; and the interchangeability of historiography and myth. Technology and science, referred to by Zachry variously as “Smart”, “Civ’lize”, and “cleverness” are treated with desire and apprehension in both novels. Meronym, a “Prescient” who visits the Valleysmen, asserts the ambiguous benefit of technology and knowledge, arguing that mastery of technology did not preclude its misuse: “human hunger birthed the Civ’lize, but human hunger killed it too” (CA 286).305 Riddley Walker and “Sloosha’s Crossin’” both allude to the myth of Prometheus as an illustration of the potential ills of technology. Prometheus – a Titan – steals fire from the gods and gives it to humans, thereby enabling scientific progress.306 Riddley recounts the tale of the “Hart of the Wud”, in which a man and a woman – survivors of the nuclear holocaust – are shown the secret of how to make fire. They use the fire to cook their baby for food, yet, having satiated their hunger, “they fel a sleap by ther fire and the fire biggering on it et them up they bernt to death”.307 Meronym’s version of the Promethean myth features a crow, which has been sent by a wise man and his people to find fire in a volcano and return with a flaming branch. The crow finds the volcano and lights the branch and returns home while suffering the “fire lickin’ up that stick, eyes smokin’, feathers crispin’, beak burnin’...It hurts!” (CA 299). Meronym remarks that the story’s central message is “how we humans got our spirit” (CA 299). In both novels, the survivors of nuclear desolation express regret and grief for the loss of “Smart” or “cleverness”. This disconnect from the past is brutally dramatized in the deaths of Riddley’s and Zachry’s fathers (symbolic of a loss of grand narrative, as I discussed in relation to Eiji in number9dream). Both Riddley and Zachry entertain feelings of guilt for the demise of their fathers. Mitchell takes this a step further in Zachry’s dream about his dead “freakbirthed” son, in which his lover, Jayjo, gives birth to a child with “no mouth, nay, no nose-holes neither” and who dies moments after birth (CA 254). In his dream, Zachry holds the mutant baby and carves it a mouth, prompting the baby to ask “why’d you kill me, Pa?” (CA 257). Zachry is somehow implicated in the death of his son by the very fact of his paternity. Thus Mitchell gives voice to the unacknowledged

305 The Prescients are the only group of humans to have retained pre-lapsarian technology and scientific knowledge. They are also the only humans who remember life before the nuclear holocaust. 306 Thomas Martin, Ancient Greece: From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times, (Newhaven: Yale University Press, 2000), 69. 307 Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker, (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012), 4. future generations, who may well be born into a ravaged environment that cannot sustain them.

The experience of reading Riddley Walker and “Sloosha’s Crossin’” is challenging because of the unfamiliarity of the language, grammar and spelling. Critics of Riddley Walker have discussed the significance of Hoban’s imagined post-nuclear English. Condensing R. D Mullen’s analysis of the novel, Kenneth Andrews summarises the characteristics of “riddleyspeak” thus:

Relative to our modern standard(s), Riddley uses a more “phonetic” spelling, partially indicative of some sound shifts; a modified vocabulary with apparent folk etymologies and largescale backformation; and markedly reduced punctuation.308 Mitchell similarly employs “phonetic” spelling, but in a less radical fashion than does Hoban. Jeffrey Porter offers a postmodern reading of language in Riddley Walker, arguing that moments of being “lost in translation” evince the autonomy of language: “clearly language knows things its users do not, as though it had a mind of its own”.309 Meaning and narrative details change over time, either through the process of reiteration or through the transformation of language. As Riddley observes: “It aint in the natur of a show to be the same every time it aint like a story what you pas down trying not to change nothing which even then the changes wil creap in”310. The Eusa show tour, a ritual Punch and Judy-style performance that travels from town to town, is conceived from Eusa’s desire that “he would tell everyone his story so that they would know the road he took was wrong and the harm he did”.311 The evolution of language, and the contingency of meaning on the reader’s perspective reinforce Cloud Atlas’ scepticism of any claim to quantifiable, fixed truths or set narratives of the past and future.

Intertextuality, Mitchell’s “metaphor bank”, bolsters the novel’s exploration of a number of themes. This chapter has provided but a few examples, and much more could be made of Mitchell’s indebtedness to Solzhenitsyn (quoted by Cavendish), and to Orwell, Bradbury, Huxley, and Margaret Atwood, to name a few. However, here as

308 Mullen, R. D. “Dialect, Grapholect, and Story: Russell Hoban's "Riddley Walker" as Science Fiction,” Science Fiction Studies 27, no. 3 (2000), 412. This article was published containing a response from Kenneth Andrews. 309 Porter, Jeffrey. “"Three Quarks for Muster Mark": Quantum Wordplay and Nuclear Discourse in Russell Hoban's "Riddley Walker," Contemporary Literature 31, no. 4 (1990), 461. 310 Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker, 205. 311 R. D Mullen, “Dialect, Grapholect, and Story: Russell Hoban's "Riddley Walker" as Science Fiction,” 403. elsewhere, Mitchell refers equally to “high” and “low” works of art. Cavendish exemplifies this postmodern approach, moving freely between allusions to classical and contemporary texts. Attempting to flee from the nursing home, Timothy Cavendish cries out ‘Soylent Green is people!’ (CA 179), foreshadowing the unwitting cannibalism of the fabricants in “An Orison of Sonmi”. By situating his fiction amongst “a constellation” of other works (both “high” and “low”) via intertextual allusion, Mitchell also manages to produce a sense of literature as connected to, or in dialogue with, other fictions. Furthermore, it is not merely that fictions are connected via the recycling of generic tropes, intertextual resonances, and archetypes of plot and character, but that fictions also connect humans with each other across time and space. Intertextuality produces temporal hybridity – planetary time – within the text and in the act of reading, insofar as the reader’s context comes into contact with the text’s context of production. Narratives may be used to produce dangerous virtual futures and manipulated virtual pasts, but they also present an ideal of solidarity. The palimpsest of stories that comprise Cloud Atlas – the main narratives, Mitchell’s multiverse, and the literary heritage from which he draws – “shatters the twin dominion” of the two potential futures suggested by Jameson, by reminding the reader that these futures (and pasts) are virtual – they are simply fallible narratives. The power of totalizing narratives – particularly narratives of desire produced by a capitalist system that reframes humans as consumers and workers – is illustrated throughout Cloud Atlas. Nevertheless, through the postmodern technique of metafiction, Mitchell destabilises the perceived inexorability of global capitalism. This possibility informs the concluding remarks offered by Adam Ewing, who is converted to support of the Abolitionist movement after he is rescued by Autua from the murderous intent of Dr Henry Goose.

Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rise & falls of civilizations My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules; only outcomes. What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts. What precipitates acts? Belief. Belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind & in the mind’s mirror, the world. (CA 527-8) In Ewing’s metaphor, “the mind’s mirror”, the world, history, and futurity are constructs of which the mind makes sense via narrative (a narrative which reflects the context of the perceiver). Ewing concedes the difficulty of his hope; that he is “[…] not deceived. It is the hardest of worlds to make real” (CA 528). Mitchell does not affirm the likelihood of Ewing’s desired world (one in which slavery is abolished, and true, peaceful equality is assured), but rather he produces a space for reimagining the future outside the binary of a totalising system of society or the apocalypse in which “one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself” (CA 528). Cloud Atlas laments the treatment of a range of marginalised peoples, and, on a grander scaler, the mistreatment of the planet. The novel weaves a narrative of ecological ruination – from the landscaping and over-fishing of the Chathams, the potential disaster at the “Swannekke B” nuclear plant in Buenas Yerbas, the toxic deadlands of Nea So Copros (Korea), to the slowly recovering ecosystem of Hawaii in “Sloosha’s Crossin’”.

Mitchell’s novel fulfils Jameson’s criteria of a “new political art” as discussed in chapter one of this thesis. Cloud Atlas’s subject is “the world space of multinational capital” – it examines human history from the early stages of global trade to its demise and putative rebirth in “Sloosha’s Crossin’”. The novel exhibits a range of postmodern techniques – particularly intertextuality, experimental structuring, and metafictional self-reflexivity – to convey a postmodern incredulity towards metanarratives. These techniques are nevertheless mobilised to produce a sense of the planetary by forging interconnections through narrative and narrative tropes. Without surrendering to a totalizing narrative of truth, Cloud Atlas reconfigures “our positioning as individual and collective subjects and [allows us to] regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion”.312 The purpose of Cloud Atlas is to reveal, in Sonmi’s words,

[… a cycle as old as tribalism. In the beginning there is ignorance. Ignorance engenders fear. Fear engenders hatred, and hatred engenders violence. Violence breeds further violence until the only law is whatever is willed by the most powerful. (CA 360-1) Yet, as Sonmi concludes, “We are only what we know” (CA 217). Cloud Atlas puts into sharp focus the significance of narratives in defining ourselves, our pasts, and our future.

312 Fredric Jameson, The Antonomies of Realism, 92. “A One You”: Expression and Identity in Black Swan Green

“You are entirely of your words” – Eva Van Outryve de Crommelynck

David Mitchell’s fourth novel, Black Swan Green, is remarkable within his oeuvre for its overtly autobiographical undertones. The novel is set in 1982 in a fictional village in Worcestershire called Black Swan Green. It depicts thirteen months in the life of the protagonist, Jason Taylor, a thirteen-year-old boy who struggles to conceal his stammer.313 Mitchell discussed the provenance of Black Swan Green in an article entitled “Let Me Speak”, which he wrote for the British Stammering Association:

My minor aim is to give non-stammerers an idea of what living with a speech defect is like. My major aim is to communicate what I wish someone had told me when I was a boy about handling a stammer, in the hope that it might prove helpful to anyone having to survive in a hostile schoolyard or workplace.314 The novel illustrates the immense toll that Jason’s speech disfluency has taken on his self-esteem and development. As the novel progresses, however, he discovers new methods for managing his stammer, which correspond with Mitchell’s own techniques as described in “Let Me Speak”. Mitchell evidently drew heavily upon his own childhood experiences of stammering when writing Black Swan Green, and there are demonstrable similarities between Jason and the author. Jason recounts his first experience of stammering, which occurred in front of his class: “The word ‘nightingale’ kaboomed in my skull but it just wouldn’t come out. The ‘N’ got out okay, but the harder I forced the rest, the tighter the noose got”.315 Mitchell describes his own parallel experience as follows:

Our teacher asked a question to which the answer - improbably, given our age, but Miss Hyde's expectations were high - was 'Napoleon'. I stuck my hand [up], eager to impress her, but what happened next is described above. Sure, it was humiliating - a

313 According to Mitchell, the novel has since been incorporated into curricula for speech therapists in the UK. In David Mitchell, “David Mitchell, The Art of Fiction No. 204”. 314 David Mitchell, “Let Me Speak,” The British Stammering Association, June 1, 2006, accessed October 9, 2015, https://www.stammering.org/speaking-out/article/let-me-speak. 315 David Mitchell, Black Swan Green, (London: Sceptre, 2006), 30. Further references to this edition will be included in the text in parentheses with the acronym “BSG”. couple of girls began giggling - but more than that, as the same mystery illness struck again and again, it was terrifying.316 Both Jason and Mitchell turn to writing as a primary medium of expression. As Mitchell states: “Quite probably, if I could have produced unbroken, effortless sentences like my secretly-envied class-mates, I would never have felt the need to write them down, nor become a writer”.317 Black Swan Green depicts the development of a young boy from one whose life is dominated by his speech disorder, to one who arrives at a working accommodation with the impediment, and art plays a pivotal role in this achievement. The novel’s focus on Jason’s maturation is holistic, however, and speaks to coming-of- age experiences more generally. Mitchell has remarked that his own speech disfluency “enriches [his] life, and if life is a sort of journey from some kind of ignorance to some kind of enlightenment, then some kind of disability is a head start, and that has value”.318 This observation effectively informs the novel.

Black Swan Green is on one level a Bildungsroman that revisits many of the reflections on identity that are raised in number9dream. The protagonist of number9dream, Eiji Miyake, transitions from the confusion of late adolescence into the quasi-self-assurance of adulthood. The younger Jason Taylor occupies the liminal space between naïve adolescence and the burgeoning self-awareness and critical thinking of teenage life. Both characters are beset by a postmodern crisis of self-definition, being unable to discover or cultivate a unified and coherent sense of Being. Given the strong resonances between these two novels, Kathryn Simpson’s reading of number9dream can provide insight into Black Swan Green. In particular, her observation that “in a postmodern Bildungsroman, the ‘[Real Eiji Miyake]’ is perhaps always an impossible dream and identity always provisional, contingent, and in process” is equally applicable to Jason Taylor.319 Eiji’s narrative is perpetually dogged by doubt, an inescapable symptom of an age in which the real is no longer distinguishable from the hyperreal. Individuality dissipates in the context of Tokyo’s frenetic exchange of capital and the boundaries between the internal and the external are obfuscated. In the case of Jason, external forces pressure him into mentally demarcating and repressing those parts of his identity

316 David Mitchell, “Let Me Speak”. 317 Ibid. 318 David Mitchell, interview by Barry Yeoman, “Stuttertalk Episode 402,” Stuttertalk.com, June 10, 2013, accessed October 9, 2015, http://stuttertalk.com/tag/david-mitchell/. 319 Kathryn Simpson, “Coming of Age in number9dream”. 71. that do not elicit the approval of his peers. His development is not just a matter of maturation, but also concerns the pursuit of a more authentic, planetary way of being.

As this is Mitchell’s second foray into the Bildungsroman form, this chapter will begin by delineating some characteristics that have been associated with the genre. The analysis proper will consider the ways in which Black Swan Green conforms to, and departs from, the conventional features of the Bildungsroman, as these points of comparability and difference are suggestive of the novel’s depiction of (postmodern) identity. The starting premise of this chapter is that Jason is conditioned by his postmodern context; therefore the analysis will begin with evidence of the novel’s postmodern setting and its significance to the narrative. Having established the nature of Jason’s environment, I will turn to the condition of his identity by outlining his internal divisions, which are often inspired by his speech disorder. I will enumerate the aforementioned “external pressures” that influence his self-perception, with particular reference to his parents, his sister Julia, contemporary pop culture, and most significantly, his peers. Although he strives to blend in with his peers, Jason secretly aspires to be a writer, submitting poems for publication under an alias. In an overtly metafictional section of the novel, he meets an elderly woman who for a brief period acts as his mentor. This woman, Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck, was previously encountered by the reader as a young lady in Cloud Atlas. In the fifth chapter of Black Swan Green, entitled “Solarium”, Eva guides Jason’s writing, and her lessons emphasise the necessity of authenticity and truth. Eva’s poetics resonate with Jason’s revelations on how to achieve fluency, Mitchell here underscoring the vital connections between identity, expression, and art. Global events are interwoven into Jason’s story, underscoring the planetary connections that define being (which are often obscured in a postmodern world). Black Swan Green thus exhibits the multidirectional movement between “macro and micro”. Although stylistically it is a seemingly much simpler narrative than Mitchell’s previous novels, Black Swan Green concisely conveys the destabilising effects of postmodernism on identity while nevertheless radically proposing that authenticity and truth are worthy objects of pursuit.

The parameters and features of the Bildungsroman have been the subject of debate amongst critics. As Giovanna Summerfield and Lisa Downward have outlined, the genesis of the term has been attributed to lectures delivered by Karl Morgenstern in 1819. The term gained traction in Germany during the early 19th century, with novels by authors such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Schiller, and Wilhelm von Humboldt regarded as archetypical of the genre.320 According to Florian Schweizer, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre is often cited as the touchstone against which other works should or should not be classified as Bildungsromane.321 Summerfield and Downward have surveyed many of the popular novels from the European modern period and concluded that “these works are manifest vehicles of a spirituality embedded in the Freemasonic membership”.322 In accordance with Masonic philosophy, self-perfection is a central aim in life. As the individual matures, he or she not only cultivates his or her personal virtues and education, but also contributes to the improvement of their environment. Development, however, is enabled by circumstances produced by class and wealth. Voltaire articulated the connection between the Bildungsroman and the Bildungsreise (the travel narrative) when he declared that “the two are not only much alike but sometimes so alike the reader is not sure which form is being thought of”.323 Travel, particularly in the setting of Voltaire’s Candide, is a luxury (the expense of which is directly alluded to in that short novel). Franco Moretti emphasises the class element of the Bildungsroman, noting that the subject’s “[. . .] education requires the acknowledgement that social superiority and moral superiority are one and the same”.324

As a twenty-first century English Bildungsroman, Black Swan Green also openly examines the class system. Jason’s classmates mainly come from working class backgrounds and habitually react defensively and derisively towards those from “posh” families (including the middle-class Taylors). Privileging Jason’s perspective, the novel testifies to the value of knowledge and culture, with Eva at one point admonishing Jason not to allow himself to be disempowered by the “hairy barbarians”, his boorish peers. However, education is not necessarily concomitant with goodness, as the novel establishes through the characters of Hugo Lamb (Jason’s cousin, who will be developed further into one of the antagonists in The Bone Clocks) and Hugo’s father, Jason’s Uncle Brian. Jason’s taste in art is eclectic, defying the confines of class

320 Giovanna Summerfield, “Introduction”. In New Perspectives on the European Bildungsroman, (ed.) by Giovanna Summerfield and Lisa Downward, (London: Continuum, 2010), 3. 321 Florian Schweizer, “The Bildungsroman”. In Charles Dickens in Context, (ed.) Sally Ledger and Holly Furneaux, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 141. 322 Giovanna Summerfield and Lisa Downward, “Conclusion”. In New Perspectives on the European Bildungsroman, (ed.) by Giovanna Summerfield and Lisa Downward, (London: Continuum, 2010), 174. 323 Voltaire quoted in Giovanna Summerfield, “From Bildungsroman to Bildungsreise.” In New Perspectives on the European Bildungsroman, (ed.) by Giovanna Summerfield and Lisa Downward, (London: Continuum, 2010), 82. 324 Franco Moretti, quoted in Giovanna Summerfield, “Introduction,” 3. hierarchy. As a child conditioned by postmodernity, he is equally enthused by high and low forms of art, evinced in the sundry intertextual allusions featured in the novel.

Florian Schweizer argues that the Bildungsroman, in particular the English version of the genre, is persistently concerned with “the fortunes of authors and artists”.325 This observation accords with the affinity between art and identity which Mitchell strives to forge in Black Swan Green. In Schweizer’s discussion of the Bildungsroman and the work of Charles Dickens, he cites Randolph Shaffner’s “checklist” of characteristics of the genre:

[. . .] the harmonious cultivation of a multifarious personality, the key notion of choice, the thriving for knowledge of the world, a continuous trial-and-error development of the protagonist’s natural gifts, a critical view of the world and the idea that living is an art that the apprentice has to learn. If we add to this the advancement towards a responsible and essentially humane personality, the ultimate integration into the order of the world and civilised community as well as an autobiographical point of reference, Dickens’ novels clearly reflect some of the common themes of the formation novel.326 This list of characteristics is strikingly pertinent to Black Swan Green; however, the novel does not end with its protagonist’s integration into a stable community per se. In the final chapter, Jason’s parents have separated, his older sister Julia (formerly an obstructer but now an ally) is living in a different city, and he is about to relocate to a new home and school. Although Jason is apprehensive, the reader is led to presume (from the progress Jason has made in asserting himself and communicating with his family), that he will adapt and be integrated more successfully into the as yet unknown new school than he was in his old school, in which he was continuously plagued by bullies. Lisa Downward offers a complementary perspective on the principles of the Bildungsroman as follows:

The Bildungsroman is concerned with a protagonist whose development comes about in the following ways: by the influence of external forces, either God or the outside world; by the protagonist’s imposition of innate potential on the world; or, most

325 Florian Schweizer, “The Bildungsroman,” 143. 326 Ibid. commonly, through a combination of both outward and inward shaping of the protagonist and his/her world.327 Downward’s account of the Bildungsroman focuses on the catalysts for change, and whether these are self-produced or externally influenced. Mitchell’s novel considers in turn the external and internal forces that effect Jason’s transformation. Jason’s development is positively influenced and encouraged by a number of other people (particularly women), however, a sign of maturity, according to Black Swan Green, is greater reliance on one’s own beliefs and desires. That is to say, Jason is to be liberated by living authentically and despite public opinion and fashion, rather than submitting to the limited ideals of masculinity upheld in his community.

My argument that the novel examines postmodern identity is partly grounded in the postmodern context of the novel. Black Swan Green is permeated with the ever-present threat of the Cold War. Although the novel is set in a sleepy village in the heart of Worcestershire, the young Jason is haunted by a foreboding of apocalypse. His life is dominated by his speech disorder (which he personifies as “Hangman”), yet he acknowledges a concomitant terror of the Cold War: “Apart from the Russians starting a nuclear war, my biggest fear is if Hangman gets interested in J-words, ‘cause then I won’t even be able to say my own name” (BSG 31). The former fear is shared by Jason’s friend Dean Moran, who reveals a conspiracy theory that, near the local supermarket, is “A tunnel the Ministry of Defence dug for a nuclear bomb shelter” (BSG 99). Moran’s anxiety encompasses not only the Soviet threat, but also a distrust of the British government’s capacity to protect civilians. He tells Jason that the local council and Woolworths’ executives will have space in the tunnel, and “Then that door’ll close and all of us’ll get blown to Kingdom Come” (BSG 99). These fears appear to be validated by the perpetual media coverage of global conflicts, in particular that of the Falklands War. This conflict captures the imagination of the nation, with continuous coverage and commentary broadcast through every medium. Jason is overwhelmed by the war and, after reports of the destruction of British ships and the consequent deaths, he wonders, “How can the world just go on, as if none of this is happening?” (BSG 132). For the most part, the war is a hyperreal event – the citizens of Britain engage with the conflict as if it were a sports game: “Till today, the Falklands’s been like the World Cup. Argentina’s got a strong football team, but in army terms

327 Lisa Downward, “The Bildungsroman as Spectrum”. In New Perspectives on the European Bildungsroman, 170. they’re only a corned-beef republic” (BSG 121). Jason imbibes the unrelenting jingoism espoused by media outlets such as the Daily Mail. The novel takes on the appearance of a scrapbook when Jason inserts the headline “GOTCHA”, which appears in the text as a graphic of a newspaper cutting, in which the sinking of the Argentinian ship General Belgrano is celebrated (BSG 124). Jason recounts an interview with Margaret Thatcher on the BBC, in which a reporter refers to the General Belgrano incident as “morally and legally wrong” because it took place outside the Total Exclusion Zone (BSG 125). Jason approvingly records Mrs Thatcher’s response, that “we are a country at war” (BSG 125).

The Daily Mail says the Argies should’ve thought about the consequences before they stuck their poxy blue-and-white flag on our sovereign colony. The Daily Mail’s dead right. The Daily Mail says that Leopoldo Galtieri only invaded the Falklands to distract attention from all of his own people he’s tortured, murdered and pushed out of helicopters over the sea. The Daily Mail’s dead right again. The Daily Mail says Galtieri’s brand of patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. The Daily Mail’s as right as Margaret Thatcher. (BSG 126) Jason’s unquestioning acceptance of the editorialising of the Daily Mail demonstrates his lack of objectivity or critical thinking. The excerpt quoted above is steeped in irony insofar as the reader can perceive that the young boy is parroting the propaganda of a government that seeks to absolve itself from the legally dubious killing of a number of people. Mitchell effectively conveys through this example the ways in which government and the media can produce a simulacrum of war (or, indeed, of any event or issue) in order to deceive its citizens. The persuasive power of the simulacrum is demonstrative in Jason’s transition from empathy to detachment. The drowned Argentinian officers and sailors he regards dispassionately, remarking that “when you join the army or navy in any country, you’re paid to risk your life. Like Tom Yew” (BSG 126). However, when he learns that the local boy Tom Yew has in turn been killed, his complacency is dispelled. The death of a young man personally known to Jason has the effect of making the war real, as opposed to the hyperreal football match cited earlier. His community’s grief is palpable, their patriotic enthusiasm dissipates, and Jason concludes that “Tom Yew’s death killed the thrill of the war” (BSG 140). Jason had already begun to question the Daily Mail and the infallibility of Mrs Thatcher after a discussion with Julia, who had pointed out that there was no means of discovering whether the British government was lying to its own people. On the surface, Black Swan Green is Mitchell’s most provincial novel, yet the life of Jason Taylor is inextricably linked with the planetary. The backdrop of the Falklands War is brought to the fore through the hostile relationship between Jason’s parents, and he writes a poem that connects the global event to his family crisis. His mentor, Eva, recognises this connection when reading his poem:

So these demons who do war in the garden, they symbolise General Galtieri and Margaret Thatcher. I am right? […] But they are also your father and your mother, however. I am right? (BSG 184) His parents’ toxic relationship has severe effects on Jason, exacerbating his stammer and eventually resulting in his moving to another town. The stand-off between global authorities during the Falklands War also produces substantial ramifications for their subjects. By accessing a planetary event via a microcosmic analogy, Black Swan Green reinforces the individual connections with, and pathos for, global tragedies that are often rendered as hyperreal. This kind of analogy appeared in Mitchell’s short story “The Massive Rat”, in which a man named Fred (originally from Black Swan Green) recounts the hostile environment of his own home after he and his wife decide to separate: “Me and Lorna have sort of Berlinned the house into her zone and mine”.328

Another symptom of the postmodern condition (and the supremacy of the simulacrum) apparent in the novel is the saturation of everyday life with brand names and products. Jason’s preoccupation with consumer-culture is discussed at length by Patrick O’Donnell in his monograph on Mitchell’s work. O’Donnell catalogues the plethora of brands referred to in the novel and considers this list in conjunction with the derogatory nickname “Thing” bestowed upon Jason by his sister:

As a middle-class child of late capitalism growing up in the Reagan-Thatcher era of trickledown economics (with its regressive policies of generating consumerist growth through class/status envy), he is a thing among things in a world of commodities proliferating at an alarming rate as part of what Jean Baudrillard terms the advancing “technological system” of the twentieth century that “has as its aims a mastery of the world and the satisfaction of needs” by means of that very proliferation.329

328 David Mitchell, “The Massive Rat,” The Guardian, August 1, 2009, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/aug/01/david-mitchell-short-story-rat. 329 Patrick O’Donnell, A Temporary Future: The Fiction of David Mitchell, 113. In this society, self-worth and popularity are often determined by the kinds of products which the individual purchases or consumes. Hugo earns the admiration of Jason’s friends by insisting on his exclusive partiality to “Lambert & Butler” cigarettes (BSG 25). Commodity-fetishism is not restricted to the children either. Jason’s mother attempts to fill the emptiness in her life by acquiring more and more expensive features for the family home. She pours her energy into crafting a magazine’s ideal appearance of a home while her relationship with her husband becomes increasingly strained. Jason’s Uncle Brian dismisses Julia’s choice of university (Edinburgh) not on the grounds of the quality of its courses, but because it does not carry the prestige - that is to say (in his conception), the market value - of Oxford or Cambridge. Brian does, however, invert Quasar’s complaint in Ghostwritten about homogenisation and multinational capitalism. In a xenophobic rant about the proliferation of Japanese commodities, he remarks that “[. . .] the Japs are still fighting the war. They own Wall Street. London’s next” (BSG 62). Whereas Quasar resents what he perceives to be the homogenisation of the high street in Okinawa with American products, Brian identifies with chagrin the same kind of saturation of his own environment with Japanese influences. Brian and Quasar both regard consumption as an expression of identity; the presumably patriotic individual will consume commodities produced by their country of origin. Jason’s mentor Eva bemoans the encroachment of commodification in everyday life after she observes his football jersey emblazoned with the brand label Hitachi: “So you pay an organisation to be their advertisement? Allons donc. In clothes, in cuisine, the English have an irresistible urge to self-mutilation” (BSG 192).

As was noted in the chapter on number9dream, a discrete sense of self is almost impossible to achieve in the postmodern era. Jason’s identity is mediated not only by the hyperreal, consumer culture that surrounds him, but also through his conscious attempts to cultivate an idealised and unassailable personality. He compartmentalises those parts of himself that he regards as incongruous with the person he ought to be. Who Jason is (at the beginning of the novel) and why he enacts this “self-mutilation”, is the result of external pressures that are internalised and made indistinct from his own thoughts. The principal antagonist of the novel is not any member of his family, nor the school bullies Ross Wilcox and Neal Brose (another of Mitchell’s reoccurring characters, whom the reader previously encountered as a tormented adult in Ghostwritten), but his stammer, the “Hangman”. In the second chapter, Jason imagines his executioner/speech disorder with “Pike lips, broken nose, rhino cheeks, red eyes ‘cause he never sleeps”, much as Mitchell envisioned his own speech disorder as a “shady homunculus” or an “anti-matter Gollum” (BSG 31).330 In the first few pages of the novel, Jason refers to Hangman without as yet offering any explanation of this seemingly invisible (yet undeniably tyrannical) entity. It is important to note that Hangman’s power derives from Jason’s fear of how he may be perceived by others. Hangman is the personification of the fear of being judged. Jason also anthropomorphises his emotions into the adversarial alter-egos “Unborn Twin” and “Maggot” (the latter being the name by which the bullies refer to him), who respectively embody his reckless and fearful thoughts (BSG 20).

The fear of being judged and ostracised as an outsider (or “Other”) contributes to the fragmentation of Jason’s identity. The first chapter of the novel, entitled “January Man” establishes the fractures in Jason’s sense of self (through intertextual allusion) and the external pressures that created these rifts in the first place. “January Man” is replete with gothic overtones, and derives from a short story which was published in 2003 by Granta.331 The chapter culminates in a horrifying encounter with an old lady in a house in the woods, who insists that Jason keep quiet as “You’ll be very sorry if you wake my brother” (BSG 22). Anne Fuchs has argued that “this scene leads to the interpretation that the brother the old woman was talking of is only her Alter Ego”.332 The scene is also suggestive of Hitchcock’s film Psycho, reinforced by the revelation (in the final chapter) that the brother is dead, and by the appearance of “Norman Bates”, a bus driver, later in the novel. The ominous atmosphere of the first chapter conveys the sinister potential of the divided personality. The old woman, the original Norman Bates, and, to a lesser extent, Jason himself, are tormented by those aspects of their identity that they cannot (or refuse to) reconcile. These characters are comparable because they are ostracised from society although, in the case of Jason, it is as much the fear as the reality of ostracism that propels him to compartmentalise and suppress various dimensions of his personality. What ensues, in effect, is a maddening cycle that Jason experiences as violent and oppressive. This is expressed in his descriptions of boyhood

330 David Mitchell, “Let Me Speak”. 331 David Mitchell, “The January Man,” Granta: The Magazine of New Writing, April 14, 2003, https://granta.com/the-january-man/. The story was published in conjunction with Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists showcase. 332 Anne Fuchs, “David Mitchell’s ‘The January Man’,” (Scholarly Paper, Ruhr – Universität Bochum, 2004), 9. and play: “it’s all ranks, being a boy, like the army” (BSG 4). He cynically declares that “Games and sports’re really about humiliating your enemies”, thereby divesting children’s activities of their putative innocence (BSG 7). Jason attributes life-defining power to his peers and the labels they bestow upon each other. Names reflect social status, and Jason exhibits strict adherence to a tacitly accepted social hierarchy. His friend Dean Moran is very unpopular and is denigrated as “Moron”, and Jason confides to the reader that: “I call him ‘Dean’ if we’re on our own but names aren’t just names. Kids who’re really popular get called by their first names, so Nick Yew’s always just ‘Nick’” (BSG 4). The child in question has no power to define himself (it is the group dynamic amongst boys on which the novel largely focuses). According to Jason, “It’s easier to change your eyeballs than to change your nickname” (BSG 18). Actively assuming the labels “Hangman”, “Maggot”, and “Unborn Twin”, Jason has internalised the methods of bullying utilised by his peers, as well as their value judgements about masculinity. Another alias he adopts is “Eliot Bolivar”, the nom-de-plume he attaches to the poetry which he submits to the local church gazette. When interrogated by Eva about his pseudonym, Jason concedes that he is afraid of being ridiculed by his friends because writing is “sort of . . . gay” (BSG 194). As Eva points out to him, the pseudonym is aspirational (evoking as it does T. S. Eliot and Simon Bolivar), and she concludes that there is “One Jason Taylor who seeks approval of hairy barbarians. Another Jason Taylor is Eliot Bolivar who seeks approval of the literary world” (BSG 195).

Jason’s tendency to demarcate aspects of his personality is ultimately in reaction to external influences. He is sensitive to the perceived and pronounced judgements of a number of people, and expresses simultaneous acquiescence to, and dispassionate observations about, these opinions. The novel begins with an illustration of Jason’s relationship with his father. The very first line is a draconian rule issued by his father: “Do not set foot in my office” (BSG 1). The phone is ringing incessantly, and Jason cautiously enters the office. The aura of his father’s authority is apparent in the hallowed tones with which Jason describes the room. It has a “serious clock”, he notes a photo depicting his father being congratulated by his boss on receiving a promotion, and the phone is “red like a nuclear hotline” (BSG 1). Jason’s image of his father as an idealised, self-possessed entity reflects his own lack of self-esteem. He perceives himself as perpetually erring and unusually ignorant (in contrast to his father). His speech disorder elicits a paternal response that makes him feel deficient: “If I stammer with Dad, he gets that face he had when he got his Black and Decker Workmate home and found it was minus a crucial packet of screws. Hangman just loves that face” (BSG 40). Jason fears disappointing his father by not meeting the criteria of intelligence, confidence and received opinions about business, masculinity, and politics. Jason’s nature is sensitive and bookish, and cannot be reconciled with his father’s postulation that “Technology, design, electric cars. That’s what schools should be teaching. Not all this ‘wandered lonely as a cloud’ guff” (BSG 59). Jason’s apprehension about incurring his father’s disapproval does not compare, however, with his dread of embarrassing himself in front of his peers. When he is scheduled to read a passage to his class he is overwhelmed with anxiety, referring to the event as his “public execution” (BSG 28). His hyperbolically expressed terror of reading aloud has its origins in the aforementioned incident when he first stammered (which was also in front of his class mates). He recounts the memory with seismic embellishments, fixating on the sensation of being utterly exposed and judged: “Every cloud, every car on every motorway, even Mrs Thatcher in the House of Commons’d frozen, listening, watching, thinking, What’s wrong with Jason Taylor?” (BSG 31). The opinions of his peers dictate the way he speaks (demonstrative in his scheme of personification); how he dresses (he can’t wear his black parka because such an item of clothing signifies that “you fancy yourself as a hard-knock”); where he sits in class; who he talks to; and what he is allowed to discuss (“books’re gay so I talked about the Game of Life”) (BSG 3, 5).

The novel develops a portrait of Jason as constantly engaged in self-censorship, only uninhibited in his narration to the reader. During his poetry lessons, however, Eva compels him to confide many of his fears and secrets, as well as to admit his reasons for being so secretive. These meetings, unbeknownst to Jason at the time, signify a major point in his quest to live authentically. Eva encourages Jason to find himself in art, advising him, for example, to read Alain Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, a classic Bildungsroman pertinent to his stage of life.333 When critiquing his own writing, she draws attention to Jason’s timidity, claiming that “‘Here in your poems you do what you do not dare to do,’ she jabbed at the window, ‘here. In reality. To express what is

333 Mitchell has cited le Grand Meaulnes as one of his ‘top reads’ and its influence on Black Swan Green is palpable. In David Mitchell, “My Book Shelf: Cloud Atlas Author David Mitchell’s Top Reads”, The Telegraph, November 27, 2015, accessed July 5, 2016, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/david- mitchell-bookshelf/. here.’ She jabbed my heart. It hurt” (BSG 184). Eva challenges Jason to discard the literary affectations of his work, informing him that:

Beautiful words ruin your poetry. A touch of beauty enhances a dish, but you throw a hill of it into the pot! No, the palate becomes nauseous. You belief [sic] a poem must be beautiful, or it can have no excellence. I am right? […] Beauty is not excellence. Beauty is distraction, beauty is cosmetics, beauty is ultimately fatigue. (BSG 185) Her account of beauty is purposefully ephemeral, as she states that “Beauty is immune to definition”, and that “The master knows he does not know what beauty is” (BSG 185). In dismissing the pursuit of beauty, Eva elevates the significance of truth in art.334 She proclaims that “True poetry is truth. Truth is not popular, so poetry also is not” (BSG 196). Continuing this train of thought, she declares that “if an art is true, if an art is free of falseness, it is, a priori, beautiful” (BSG 196). The conflation of poetry (art) and truth reinforces the significance of narratives in human life. In the introduction to this thesis I referred to Frank Kermode’s assessment of literature as a means through which the individual (living in medias res) can make sense of their lives. In Black Swan Green, Jason’s true self comes into being through the act of expression, just as his disfluency – his inability to express himself – causes his fragmentation. At the beginning of the novel, he bemoans the suppression of his thoughts and feelings, remarking that “I can feel the stuff I don’t say rotting inside me like mildewy spuds in a sack” (BSG 40). Art is a vessel for the “stuff” he doesn’t say, thereby playing a vital and tangible role in his life. The idea that the self is only accessible through narrative (and expression is the translation of the self into narrative), is postmodern. This is not necessarily a nihilistic position in Mitchell’s fiction, rather it is the notion that one can pursue a “truer truth” (to quote Adam Ewing). Eva is urging Jason to express himself as he truly perceives himself to be, rather than what he ought to be. Like Eiji, Jason needs to accept the narrative of his past rather than attempt to rewrite it (and himself in the process). The instances of authorial self-reflexivity offer intimations of an optimistic outcome for Jason.

334 Eva’s ideas about art are indebted to the Modernist context of her own artistic upbringing. She implies that she had romantic relationships with Picasso and Walt Whitman and that she had once rejected the advances of Ernest Hemingway. Furthermore, there is an arguable resemblance to Gertrude Stein. Eva and Stein are both expatriates who guide and instruct artists and writers from the vantage point of their living rooms. The most apparent instance of the author’s self-reference in the novel is when Jason observes a “moon-grey cat” watching him from the neighbour’s porch. He wistfully remarks that he “Wished there was some way a boy could turn into a cat” (BSG 46). The moon-grey cat is recognisable to the avid reader of Mitchell’s work as a symbol of the author (and this particular appearance certainly reinforces such a reading). It is a playful moment of dramatic irony; the reader is aware that this boy can (and will, given the link between Mitchell and Jason) find a way to be liberated into a cat, namely through fiction.

The focus of my analysis has been, up to this point, upon the internal and external forces that shape and determine Jason’s identity. His identity develops over the course of the novel, as is in keeping with the Bildungsroman genre. A number of coming-of- age milestones can be identified throughout Jason’s narrative. Apart from his aforementioned artistic education, Jason also undergoes a sexual awakening, a moral education, and the development of an independent, critical mind. At the beginning of the novel, Jason is strongly constrained by his fear of appearing like a “Maggot” or stammering in front of his peers and family. Jason’s cousin Hugo criticises him for his timidity, and suggests that this is the cause of his social problems:

‘This “not today” attitude of yours is a cancer. Cancer of the character. It stunts your growth. Other kids sense your not- todayness, and despise you for it. “Not-today” is why those plebs in Black Swan make you nervous. “Not today” – I would bet – is at the root of that speech defect of yours.’ (A shame-bomb blew my head off.) ‘“Not today” condemns you to be the lapdog of authority, any bully, any shitehawk. They sense you won’t stand up to them. Not today, not ever. “Not today” is the blind slave of every petty rule. Even the rule that says’ (Hugo did this bleaty voice) ‘“No, smoking is BAD! Don’t listen to naughty Hugo Lamb!” Jason, you have to kill “not today”’ (BSG 81). Hugo’s aggressive critique is, in Jason’s words, “appallingly true” (BSG 81). The characterisation of Jason’s attitude as “not-today” implies that he is disconnected from a coherent sense of planetary being. He is not temporally constituted because he denies himself the experiences of the present, delaying self-actualisation to a future that is not realised. Jason accepts Hugo’s offer of a cigarette in view of this criticism. Smoking is construed as a rite of passage for a boy, yet there is no clean transition for Jason, who swiftly vomits after inhaling the tobacco smoke. Another fraught rite of passage is represented in the fourth chapter. Left alone for a day by his family, he chooses to walk down the Bridlepath and discover its secrets. Like the pathway in Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken”, the Bridlepath has symbolic overtones. This is the first independent physical journey taken by Jason, and reinforces the correlation between travel and maturation associated with the Bildungsroman. By the end of the chapter there are intimations that Jason is beginning to leave childhood behind, having undergone a sexual awakening. He encounters his classmate Dawn Madden, who manipulates him into an erotic interaction, even though he does not fully understand his feelings. The two sit on a tractor together, and Dawn feeds Jason with a pastry from an arrow she has whittled from a stick. Jason describes Dawn’s body in great detail, and is caught off guard by “a boner as big as a Doberman” (BSG 106). Dawn is the dominant partner, having forced Jason to eat like a “doggy”, and she “pricked [his] Adam’s apple with her arrow” (BSG 106). Dawn then changes her approach, faking outrage that Jason ate her “cherry”, and demanding that he consider how he is going “to pay for it” (BSG 106). Jason does not follow the meaning of her flirtation (taking her words literally and offering her a packet of sweets), and she instructs him to leave her immediately. By himself again, Jason reflects upon his romantic and sexual inexperience. He confesses to the reader that:

The only actual vagina I’ve ever seen was on a greasy photo Neal Brose charged us 5p to look at. It was a baby kangaroo-prawn in its mother’s hairy pouch. I almost vommed up my Mars Bar and Outer Spacers. (BSG 108) Further down the Bridlepath, however, Jason secretly witnesses an act of copulation. He is hiding in a tree when Tom Yew and his girlfriend Debbie Crombie settle beneath the boughs and engage in sexual intercourse which (as is later revealed) leads to conception. Jason’s description of the scene renders the act abject rather than exalted; Tom Yew’s skin is “glazed in roast pork sweat”, and “the noises they made weren’t quite human” (BSG 112). He concludes (ashamed by his voyeurism) that he is “Not proud and not pleased and not like [he] ever wanted to do that” (BSG 112). Over the course of the novel, Jason develops romantic feelings for two other girls, and in the penultimate chapter he shares his first kiss with a classmate named Holly Deblin. Concurrent with his sexual development, he evinces a growing emotional maturity. Dean explains to Jason that his alcoholic father has two different personas according to whether he is drinking or sober. Jason privately reflects: Green is made of yellow and blue, nothing else, but when you look at green, where’ve the yellow and the blue gone? Somehow this is to do with Moran’s dad. Somehow this is to do with everyone and everything. (BSG 101) In this moment, Jason acknowledges that human identity is changeable and nuanced. His compassion for others is founded on this understanding of human character, and it informs his increasingly enlightened approach towards those who do not conform with societal norms (such as the gypsies who camp outside Black Swan Green), and those who have made him suffer (such as the bully Ross Wilcox). The masonic heritage of the bildungsroman promotes the development of a boy into a cosmopolitan man, and Jason’s maturation is accompanied by the development of a cosmopolitan ethos and planetary sensibility.

Jason’s compassion is tested in the sixth chapter. He is invited to compete for membership in the mysterious local gang known as the “Spooks”, which comprises several popular students from his school. Initiation requires him successfully to complete a dangerous obstacle course within a short period of time, across a number of private properties, and without being sighted by the occupants. Furthermore, he is competing against his friend Dean. Membership into the group promises immunity from the school bullies whom Jason fears. He successfully navigates the obstacle course, but is shortly thereafter faced with a dilemma when he hears Dean fall through the roof of a glasshouse. The Spooks forbid Jason from helping Dean, lest they should all be punished for engaging in the dangerous activity. Despite the threat of ostracism (or worse), Jason chooses to help his devoted friend. This decision to prioritise loyalty over self-interest has severe ramifications.

The perceptiveness that Jason displays in the “Bridlepath” chapter produces bittersweet insights in the seventh chapter, entitled “Souvenirs”. Jason is taken on two separate holidays, by his father and mother respectively. First, he accompanies his father on a work trip to Brighton. Several incidents prompt a reconsideration of his father as an unassailable figure of authority. At the beginning of the chapter, Jason still considers his father to be a model of masculinity and adulthood, a standard by which he compares himself, as is demonstrated when he shaves his face with his father’s razor, and notices that “Dad’s gritty stubble and my almost invisible fur snowed together on to the white porcelain sink” (BSG 226). When he accidentally observes his father’s genitalia, his first impulse again is to compare himself with his father: “Stark raving nuddy, he was, but right where my sack-and-acorn is, Dad’s got this wobbling chunky length of oxtail” (BSG 228). He is awed by the sight and wonders, “But will I just wake up one morning and find that rope between my legs?” (BSG 228). On their first night in Brighton, his father returns to the hotel room very late, drunk, and proceeds to urinate on the bathroom floor and stumble around naked. Jason excuses his father’s poor conduct, when they start the following day bonding over kite-flying, geology and the purchase of a souvenir – a “Lytoceras fimbriatum” (BSG 230). As they are walking through the village, however, Jason collides with his father’s boss, Craig Salt, who admonishes Jason for the accident. Rather than stand up to his obnoxious boss, who was responsible for the collision, Jason’s father responds obsequiously, even deferring to Salt’s ignorant assertion that the Lytoceras is a trilobite. This mundane interaction triggers a life- changing revelation for Jason. He feels a keen loss of respect for his father and therefore of subservience to his authority. From this point onward, he begins to think independently – and critically – of his father. The disjuncture represented in this chapter foreshadows a more profound alienation from his father that occurs later in the novel. After his father’s extramarital affair is exposed, his parents decide to divorce. In Jason’s final interaction with his father, it is the latter who assumes a supplicatory position; he tentatively requests that Jason come to stay with him occasionally (Jason’s mother has evidently been granted primary custody of their son). In the earlier discussion of number9dream, I argued that Eiji’s desire for his own absent father is an expression of the postmodern loss of grand narratives – he believes that his identity crisis can only be solved by meeting his father. Ultimately, however, in both cases the father figure is incapable of offering the credible guidance, example, and authority that their sons seek. The task of self-definition is no longer ceded to the father (or to a grand narrative), but Jason and Eiji are required to cultivate and determine their own sense of self. Later in Black Swan Green, Jason approaches his father to inform him that he has made the decision to become a forester when he graduates: “I ran up to him and looked him square in the eye. Suddenly, I’m nearly as tall as he is” (BSG 321). (In The Bone Clocks, Hugo Lamb’s family discuss Jason’s career as a speech therapist, reinforcing Jason’s function as one of the author’s alternative selves).335

Another point of similarity between Eiji and Jason is the unexpected importance of their relationships with their mothers. As Jason concludes, “You and your mum need to like

335 David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks, (London: Sceptre, 2014), 112. each other. Not love, but like” (BSG 246). The father is a model of masculinity – he is important as a model and a standard for the boy’s future self. The relationship with the mother is not fraught with this burden of comparison. Jason does not feel the need to impress his mother, partly because of her acceptance of his speech defect. As alluded to earlier, the women in Jason’s life are more capable of fostering his confidence and offering care than the men. His sister supports him through his parents’ divorce; Eva instructs him in art and poetry; his speech therapist, Mrs de Roo, provides him with strategies to manage his disfluency; a transgender woman reassures him that admitting to his parents that he broke his grandfather’s watch (the guilt of which torments him throughout the novel) will not destroy his relationship with them; and, finally, the old woman in the House in the Woods at the conclusion of the novel enables Jason to reach new insights on how to arrive at a “working accommodation” with Hangman. In their different ways, these women enable Jason to accept himself as he is; they absolve him from the pressure to mould himself according to an idealised model of masculinity.

Jason himself becomes increasingly aware of the arbitrariness and sinister potential of a strict, white, heteronormative social ideal. In the ninth chapter, entitled “Knife Grinder”, Black Swan Green village is in uproar after the council proposes to erect a site for the permanent settlement of a gypsy community. Jason attends an “emergency meeting” with his father about the matter. He observes the Stalinist-style banner of the “VILLAGE CAMP CRISIS COMMITTEE” written in black and “blood red” (BSG 287). Despite the impassioned speeches of the committee members, Jason is left “thinking how the villagers wanted the gypsies to be gross, so the grossness of what they’re not acts as a stencil for what the villagers are” (BSG 288). This insight reverberates with the many forms of discrimination and intolerance referred to in the novel, and points towards Jason’s developing cosmopolitan ethos. The adult men and women railing against the gypsies resemble the bullies amongst Jason’s peers, who perpetually voice homophobic slurs because they fear their own emasculation. Jason identifies fear as the root cause of all such discrimination, and critiques the “camp crisis” committee’s argument as propaganda: “I thought how all leaders can sense what people’re afraid of and turn that fear into bows and arrows and muskets and grenades and nukes to use however they want. That’s power” (BSG 288-9). This critique allows a modicum of pity for the people whose fear is being exploited, and acknowledges the insidiousness of social conditioning. Jason, despite his liberal views, earlier manifests his own conditioning when he envisions a gypsy sharpening his mother’s knives:

His metal files, stones, his (what?) flint flywheel. Crouched over it, his face glowing and creased like a goblin, eyes burning dangerous. One claw making the flywheel spin, faster, blurrier, one claw bringing the blunt blades closer, slowly, closer […]. (BSG 285) It is only after he literally falls into the gypsies’ camp in the woods that he is forced to reassess his ideas of their culture and lifestyle. He befriends Alan Wall, a gypsy boy (who will reappear as a teenager in The Bone Clocks), and discovers that it is the gypsies who run the annual Goose Fair, which Jason regards as “literally magic” (BSG 319). The gypsies are deterritorialised beings whose culture is fundamentally transitory, and their way of life is threatened by the forces of nationalism.

It is no coincidence that Jason’s most significant epiphany occurs at the Goose Fair – a space characterised by its deterritorialised organisers (the gypsies), and its fantastical ambience. Jason finally confronts his “not-today” attitude in the Hall of Mirrors. The extreme bullying he had endured after the Spooks incident had turned him into “The Triple Invisible Boy, that’s Jason Taylor. Even I don’t see the real Jason Taylor much these days, ’cept for when we’re writing a poem, or occasionally in a mirror, or just before sleep” (BSG 296). Just as Eiji wondered if the projection of himself in his dreams constituted the “Real Eiji Miyake”, so Jason regards his true self as something outside his grasp. The Hall of Mirrors fragments and distorts his reflections, so that he is surrounded by “self-mutants” (BSG 315). One of the reflections resembles an “African tribesman with a neck giraffed by iron rings”, and Jason imagines this alter ego asking him: “Can a person change […] into another person?” (BSG 315). The image of the tribesman recalls Rousseau’s discourse on primitive man, in which he argued that society and the notion of the “Faculty of Improvement” or the “Perfectibility” of the self fosters many vices and can result in internal conflict:

It would be a melancholy Necessity for us to be obliged to allow, that this distinctive and almost unlimited Faculty is the Source of all Man’s Misfortunes; that it is this Faculty, which, tho’ by slow Degrees, draws them out of their original Condition, in which his days would slide away insensibly in Peace and Innocence; that it is this Faculty, which, in a Succession of Ages, produces his Discoveries, his Virtues and his Vices, and, at long run, renders him both his own and Nature’s Tyrant.336 Black Swan Green does not necessarily subscribe to Rousseau’s caution about society on the whole, as the novel emphasises the importance of art as a vessel for truth. The image of the tribesman does suggest the idea that society produces certain pressures on the individual that, rightly or wrongly, dissuades that person from acting according to instinct. Jason grapples with inner turmoil in the pursuit of self-perfection (“perfection” as it is deemed by his society), ignoring his instincts and feelings in deference to this social ideal of perfection. A second, cube-like reflection articulates the impossibility (and the self-betrayal) of attempting this kind of self-perfection:

You can only change superficial features. An Inside You must stay unaltered to change the Outside You. To change the Inside You you’d need an Even More Inside You, who’d need an Inside the Even More Inside You to change it. And on and on. You with me? (BSG 315-6) These words evoke a Heideggerean concept of Being, as was discussed in the chapter on Ghostwritten. It is an essentialist idea of the self as distinct from the world. If one were to consider Jason’s journey through a Heideggerean lens, this scene is illustrative of anxiety – the kind of introspection required for the individual fully to comprehend him or herself. Up to this point, Jason has been subject to the crisis of cognitive mapping; he cannot situate himself in the world because he is overwhelmed by too many external pressures and ideas, beneath which his identity has been submerged. This scene, in which Jason is confronted with disparate versions of himself, dramatizes this crisis. One such oppositional voice is that of “Maggot”. It articulates the concerns that have inhibited Jason over the past year, and urges him to disregard the other reflections:

Don’t listen to them. Ross Wilcox and Gary Drake and Neal Brose pick on us because you don’t blend in. If you had the right hair and clothes and spoke the right way and hung out with the right people, things’d be fine. Popularity’s about following weather forecasts. (BSG 316) Maggot’s suggestion that popularity is as changeable as the weather speaks to the “schizophrenic” nature of the postmodern condition. Jason has been incapable of consolidating his identity because he subjects himself to ever-changing fashions of

336 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse Upon the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality Among Mankind, (trans.) Allan Bloom, (New York: B. Franklin, 1971), 37, 38. behaviour. Realising this, the “Upside-down” reflection of Jason proposes that he live authentically:

How about an Outside You […] who is your Inside You too? A One You? If people like your One You, great. If they don’t, tough. Trying to win approval for your Outside You is a drag, Jason. That’s what makes you weak. It’s boring. (BSG 316) Jason agrees with his Upside-down self, a moment of acceptance which is underscored by an homage to Steven Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra Terrestrial as Dean’s little sister, dressed up like the alien, finds him in the Hall of Mirrors. This intertextual reference arrives at an interesting point in the novel, given the emphasis on a fixed, coherent self conveyed in the preceding passage. Spielberg has revealed that his films, including E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, reflect his anger at his father after his parents’ divorce.337 The allusion is bittersweet; it anticipates the divorce of Jason’s parents, while evoking the consolatory value of friendship.

Jason leaves the Hall of Mirrors an altered boy. Before he walked through this attraction, he had discovered a wallet full of money that had been lost by his chief antagonist, Ross Wilcox. He reflects that the Goose Fair “turns my weaknesses into power”, and resolves to find Ross and return the wallet (BSG 319). By embracing his “weakness” – an instinctive empathy – he perceives the weaknesses of those around him. Jason recognises that his bully is beset by the same social pressures from which he has just freed himself, and he feels pity for the “poor kid”, rather than terror or respect (BSG 323).

Jason’s commitment to being himself, irrespective of the judgement of society, leads to new insights concerning his speech defect. He returns to the House in the Woods and visits the old lady, who has become incapacitated by dementia. Jason is surprised that the wood is not at all intimidating, in contrast to his memory of it: “Hardly Amazonia [or] Sherwood Forest” (BSG 364). In his discussion of this scene, O’Donnell remarks that

The moment of scalar recognition typifies the dynamics of a novel in which the view of the world as enchanted and mythic, full of monsters, spirit-guides, and omnipotent enemies alternates with

337 Christopher Rosen, “Steven Spielberg on ’60 Minutes’: Director Reveals How Childhood Traumas Resulted in Inspiration”, The Huffington Post AU, October 23, 2012, accessed February 29, 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/steven-spielberg-60-minutes_n_2000989. scenes of disillusionment where a brutal reality intrudes as historical circumstance and the projection of fantasy intersect and collide.338 This particular moment of “disillusionment” yields positive results for Jason. He sits and talks without stammering to the old lady, who is oblivious to his words. This prompts him to speculate that:

S’pose it isn’t Hangman who causes it? S’pose it’s the other person? The other person’s expectations. S’pose that’s why I can read aloud in an empty room, perfectly, or to a horse, or a dog, or myself? […] S’pose there’s a time fuse lit when it’s a human listening, like a stick of Tom and Jerry dynamite? S’pose if you don’t get the word out before this fuse is burnt away, a couple of seconds, say, the dynamite goes off? S’pose what triggers the stammer’s the stress of hearing that fuse going ssssssss? S’pose you could make that fuse infinitely long, so that the dynamite’d never go off? How? By honestly not caring how long the other person’ll have to wait for me. Two seconds? Two minutes? No, two years? Sitting in Mrs Gretton’s yellow room it seemed so obvious. If I can reach this state of not caring, Hangman’ll remove his finger from my lips. (BSG 365-6) Hugo Lamb’s assertion that Jason’s timidity, his “not-today” attitude, was at the root of his speech defect, is ironically proven correct. In “Let Me Speak”, Mitchell similarly proposes this attitude of “militant indifference” to the thoughts and judgements of the listener: “The ‘stammer-trigger’ has to be linked to our perception of the listener: this is why we never stammer when alone”.339

Jason’s maturation simultaneously fulfils a criterion of the Bildungsroman and presents a postmodern challenge to the notion of a complete or stable self. The novel begins in January 1982, and ends in January of 1983. The first and final chapters bear the same title – “January Man”, and the novel does return to the scene of the first chapter, the House in the Woods. “January” derives from “Janus”, the two-faced Roman god who simultaneously looks into the past and faces the future.340 A “January man” evokes a sense of planetary time, of new beginnings; he is at the beginning of his manhood, facing a new year of possibilities, keeping in mind the lessons from the past. Jason identifies the recurrences and repetitiveness of life:

338 Patrick O’Donnell, A Temporary Future: The Fiction of David Mitchell, 107. 339 David Mitchell, “Let Me Speak”. 340 “[…] senex Ianique bifrontis”. In Virgil, The Aeneid 7.180. The world’s a headmaster who works on your faults. I don’t mean in a mystical or a Jesus way. More how you’ll keep tripping over a hidden step, over and over, till you finally understand: Watch out for that step! Everything that’s wrong with us, if we’re too selfish or too Yes, Sir, No, Sir, Three Bags Full, Sir or too anything, that’s a hidden step […] Joke is, once you get it into your brain about that hidden step, and think Hey, life isn’t such a shit-house after all again, then BUMP! Down you go, a whole new flight of hidden steps. (BSG 367-8) The title of Black Swan Green gestures to the tale of the “Ugly Duckling”, as befits a novel about maturation and transformation. In the fairy tale, the ugly duckling (in fact, a cygnet), is teased for her incongruous appearance by the other ducklings. She endures this criticism and is vindicated when she grows into a beautiful swan. The swan is therefore an image of the final phase of development, and Mitchell uses this symbol to interesting effect. There are no actual swans in Black Swan Green and, according to Jason, “It’s sort of a local joke” (BSG 215). A swan does, however, appear at the end of the novel, just as in the fairy tale. Suggestive of Jason’s own transformation, the swan is not the perfect image of grace, but an entity grounded in reality:

A swan slid down its slope of air to meet its reflection. A swan’s reflection slid up its slope of lake to meet the swan. Just before impact, the giant bird splayed open its wings and its webby feet pedaloed cartoonishly. It hung there, then crashed in a belly-flop of water. Ducks heckled the swan, but a swan only notices what it wishes to. She bent and unbent her neck exactly like Dad does after a very long drive. If swans weren’t real myths’d make them up. (BSG 362) The merging of the swan and its reflection recalls Jason’s resolution to be authentic, to be coherently whole, rather than divided into inner and outer selves. The journey of development is not necessarily achieved smoothly, hence the comic image of the swan’s awkward belly-flop. The swan in this montage still has much to learn, but ignores the harassment of the ducks. Jason starts to demonstrate the same resilience and self- possession in the face of peer pressure. Nevertheless, in a departure from the conventional Bildungsroman, Mitchell concludes Black Swan Green with uncertainty. Jason is left in medias res – he is in the January of his life, about to face the challenge of fitting in with a new group of children at a new school. Jason has developed insofar as gaining a much more coherent understanding of his own character, and yet he is ever in- process, just like the swan. I have drawn comparisons between Black Swan Green and number9dream at several junctures in this chapter, as both novels are Bildungsromane and explore concepts of identity within a postmodern context. Nevertheless, the two novels approach the issue in markedly different ways. The climax of Black Swan Green is the moment in which Jason adopts a “militant indifference” to the constrictive and oppressive standards of society. He gains a coherent self-narrative – a “One You” – and the commitment to living authentically. This commitment extends to a planetary sensibility, evinced in Jason’s enthusiasm for the environment, his compassion for people of different cultures and backgrounds, and an awareness and acceptance of the temporal constituents of Dasein. Jason’s struggle to define himself is undoubtedly a postmodern struggle, hence Patrick O’Donnell’s reading of the novel as “a cognitive mapping of the terrain of puberty and the beginnings of writing as a career”. As he observes:

As ‘anthropologist-creator,’ Mitchell in blackswangreen [sic] is primarily interested in understanding the vexed relation between culture and identity, and how language can imagine or ‘graph’ the black spaces that exist between the imaginary self and the impositions and constraints of the social order.341 Whether Jason truly transcends this postmodern crisis of identity is the fundamental question raised by the novel’s conclusion. Unlike Eiji’s story, which is interrupted by a number of other voices, Black Swan Green is narrated by one relatively consistent voice. Jason matures over the course of the novel, but his idiosyncratic linguistic style is identifiable throughout. O’Donnell questions the apparent unity of the novel, however, asserting that the thirteen chapters do not necessarily produce coherence:

[…] while each of the thirteen narratives are integral unto themselves as ‘short stories,’ when taken together they reveal themselves to be a series of discontinuities, notable for the temporal and spatial gaps that exist between them, rather than stagings or structural evolutions in the thirteen month[s] of Jason’s life as he lurches into adolescence. (BSG 213) As if anticipating this observation, Mitchell appears to allude to the structure of his novel in the chapter entitled “Souvenirs”, in which Jason purchases thirteen dinosaur postcards: “Each one’s got a different dinosaur, but if you put them end to end in order, the background landscape joins up and forms a frieze” (BSG 213). In other words, a kind of coherence can be achieved by narrative assemblage, but this assemblage is,

341 Patrick O’Donnell, A Temporary Future: The Fiction of David Mitchell, 104. nevertheless, contrived. This metafictional incursion is characteristic of Mitchell’s fiction. As in number9dream, the effect is, in Simpson’s words, “[…] to undercut the notion of distinct, self-authored identity”.342 Black Swan Green recaptures the postmodern scepticism for metanarratives that typifies every Mitchell novel to date. There is a notable, if fragile optimism that underscores the pursuit of a “truer Truth”, and Jason’s planetary sensibilities are founded upon this optimism.

Reclaiming History in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“Ink, thinks Jacob, you most fecund of liquids. . .”343

David Mitchell’s fifth novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, is a work of historiographic metafiction set in Dejima, a man-made island in the Bay of Nagasaki. The novel was longlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize, and was judged to be the best book in the South Asia and Europe category of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 2011. Mitchell has stated that he was inspired to write the novel after he “got off at the wrong tram stop” in Nagasaki in 1994 and came across a “cluster of warehouses from an earlier century” (TA 555). The novel largely focuses upon the eponymous protagonist, a young clerk in the employ of the Dutch East India Trading Company (VOC) who journeys to Dejima in 1799 to assist Chief Resident Unico Vorstenbosch in purging the Company of endemic corruption. As a minor character explains at one point, one of the “florid names” by which the Japanese refer to their country is “The Land of a Thousand Autumns”, hence the novel focuses specifically on Jacob’s time in Japan (TA 417).344

In the short essay “On Historical Fiction”, included as a postscript in The Thousand Autumns, Mitchell speculates about the enduring popularity of historical fiction. He observes that “[…] if History is the family tree of Now, a historical novel may illuminate the contemporary world in ways that straight history may not” (TA 558). Although distinctive in its direct engagement with a specific historical period, The

342 Kathryn Simpson, “Coming of Age in number9dream,” 39. 343 David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, (London: Sceptre, 2011), 15. Further references to this edition will be included in the text in parentheses with the acronym “TA”. 344 The English character Lieutenant Talbot explains at one point in the novel that the Japanese “give florid names to their kingdom”. Thousand Autumns returns to several social conditions and crises considered in Mitchell’s earlier novels. The novel depicts the early days of global capitalism, emphasising the plight of the worker under the VOC, and how commercial interests were supported by the press-gang systems of the British and American navies. Mitchell’s preoccupation with rampant consumerism and the exploitation of others is again manifest in The Thousand Autumns, and the spectre of Sonmi-451 and the cannibalisation of fabricants in Cloud Atlas is recalleded in the second of the five sections of The Thousand Autumns, entitled “A Mountain of Fastness”. The novel evinces a planetary scope, exploring the collision of cultures, languages, religions, measurements of time, and opposing concepts of nationalism. The Thousand Autumns is a multi-perspectival novel and Mitchell revels in, rather than resolves, the plethora of competing narratives. Grand metanarratives of truth, good, and evil are the novel’s principal objects of critique, and it becomes apparent that the zealous fanatics devoted to religious or racial metanarratives pose a danger to their society. As Marinus observes at one point: “the purest believers […] are the truest monsters” (TA 526). The novel frequently digresses from the main plot lines with interruptions by minor characters, who offer their own stories which illuminate their motives and beliefs. Furthermore, The Thousand Autumns pointedly grants narrative space to the marginalised – the exploited worker, the women, and the slaves – thereby resisting the dominance of the powerful in the crafting of history. There is consequently a sustained self-reflexive concern with the power of narrative and text that, in keeping with the rest of Mitchell’s oeuvre, animates the novel’s depiction of events and character interactions.

Several characters and events featured in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet have a historical basis. Mitchell plausibly conveys the atmosphere of desperation and corruption which pervaded Dejima at this period. As Paul Doolan observes in his article about the longstanding commercial relationship between Japan and the Netherlands, “in the eighteenth century [. . .] the VOC’s profits in Japan began to dwindle” and by “1743 the Deshima trade post made a loss for the first time”.345 The events of Part Three of the novel are based on the Nagasaki Incident of 1808, when the British Admiral Sir Edward Pellew “sailed into Nagasaki and seized hostages to ensure that the Japanese would supply their ship”.346 Mitchell moves the episode back to 1800, and the character of

345 Paul Doolan,“The Dutch in Japan,” History Today 50, no. 4 (2000), 37, 38. 346 Martha Chaiklin, “Monopolists to Middlemen: Dutch Liberalism and American Imperialism in the Opening of Japan,” Journal of World History 21, no.2 (2010), 251. Captain Penhaligon and his ship, the HMS Phoebus, are modelled on Pellew of HMS Phaeton – Mitchell directly alludes to this connection in Penhaligon’s dream of his deceased son, Tristram, who he imagines to be the captain of a ship christened Phaeton.

The mythical Phoebus, the sun-god, is the father of Phaeton, as Jacob explains to the Japanese Magistrate (TA 471). The sons of both Phoebus and Penhaligon elect to emulate their fathers with disastrous consequences. Phaeton asks to drive the chariot of the sun, and is killed after he loses control of it, and Tristram has been killed in battle whilst serving aboard the Blenheim in the Battle of Cape St Vincent in 1797. The novel’s version of the Nagasaki Incident accords with the agreed-upon facts insofar as a British frigate entered the Bay under Dutch colours, “lowered a skiff with 14 or 15 sailors, grabbed the two Dutch delegates accompanying the Japanese inspectors, and carried them back to the ship at gunpoint” after which the “oarsmen and inspectors dove into the water”.347 However, Mitchell depicts the HMS Phoebus firing upon Dejima and Nagasaki, whereas historically “no shots were fired during the mere three days the Phaeton was in port”.348 The fictional Magistrate Shiroyama, like his historical counterpart Magistrate Matsudaira Yasuhira, commits suicide “for his inability to either destroy the ship or keep it in the harbor until instructions arrived from the capital”.349 Hendrik Doeff was the factory head during the Nagaski Incident and is the inspiration for the character of Jacob.350 Doeff made several visits to Edo during his tenure in Dejima, and recorded his impressions in a private diary.351 The character of Dr Marinus is loosely based on Carl Peter Thunberg, who was “a student of Linnaeus” and who, like Marinus, “used his time as surgeon for the VOC on Deshima to collect hundreds of plants”.352 The more general descriptions of life in the late eighteenth century have been thoroughly researched, as Mitchell explains in “On Historical Fiction’. In my interview with Mitchell, he explained that Lone Wolf and Cub was “the best single research source for Jacob De Zoet” because it provided detailed “cartoon pictures of eighteenth

347 Noell Wilson, “Tokugawa Defense Redux: Organizational Failure in the Phaeton Incident of 1808,” The Journal of Japanese Studies 36, no. 1 (2010), 16. 348 Ibid., 2. 349 Ibid., 1. 350 Claire Larsonneur, “Weaving Myth and History Together: Illustration as Fabrication in David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet,” Image & Narrative 17, no. 2 (2016), 25. 351 Ibid., 17. 352 Paul Doolan, “The Dutch in Japan,” 39. century Japanese interiors”.353 Nevertheless, the novel walks the line between fiction and historical fact, ostensibly through the considered approximation of archaic language with modern speech, which Mitchell terms “Bygonese” (TA 559). He concedes that the author “[…] may also end up actually rewriting the past. History is not, after all, what really happened (no one can know; it’s gone) but only what we believe happened” (TA560). The novel draws attention to its own fictionality through instances of metafiction and the peripheral presence of the supernatural. Consequently, The Thousand Autumns is best understood as a work of historiographical metafiction. Hutcheon has observed that “Historiographic metafiction acknowledges the paradox of the reality of the past [with] its textualized accessibility to us today”.354 If the past is a vital constituent of Dasein, and if it is only accessible via text, it follows that narrative reconstruction of the past (that is, personal and public histories) is of vital significance in creating individual and collective identities. Historiographic metafictions examine the way in which narratives of the past are constructed, and the question of whose testimony is silenced in the process. Hutcheon has noted the tendency within the genre to challenge received narratives of history, suggesting that

many of these postmodern novels […] are contestatory on yet another level: they overtly pose questions about subjectivity that involve the issues of sexuality and sexual identity and of the representation of women.355 The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is one such novel, as it challenges the patriarchal bias of historiography through the narratives of female characters such as Orito Aibagawa and Otane the herbalist. A precedent for this approach can be identified in the “Holy Mountain” chapter of Ghostwritten, which, as I discussed in the second chapter of this thesis, presents an alternative, domestic account of life in China in the twentieth century. Otane resembles the old woman of Ghostwritten in her circumstances (the sole occupant of a humble dwelling on a sacred mountain), and character (both are capable, staunchly independent old women of faith). Rather than beginning the novel with a focus on the eponymous male character, Mitchell surprisingly opens with events prior to Jacob’s arrival in Japan. The title of the first part of the novel, “The Bride for Whom We Dance” (Vorstenbosch’s facetious term for Japanese copper), is suggestive

353 David Mitchell, interview by Kelly Frame, 25 May 2015, Sydney. Lone Wolf and Cub is a manga series by Kazuo Koike. 354 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 114. 355 Ibid., 160. of male, economic interests, yet the first chapter focalises on Orito the midwife as she is assisting with the difficult labour of the Magistrate’s concubine, Miss Kawasemi. The scene illustrates the strict gender divide of the Tokugawa period in Japan – the male doctor overseeing the birth, Dr Maeno is forced to remain behind a muslin curtain and not directly attend Kawasemi, because the Magistrate has ordered that “No man may touch her” (TA 3). The reader is granted a privileged view into this female-only space, but rather than tinged with mysticism, the action that ensues is characterised by Orito’s scientific methods and her reference to an illustration from Observations by William Smellie. The baby shows no signs of life, and Orito is informed by Dr Maeno that the original doctor, Dr Uragami, eschewed responsibility for the delivery:

After the baby stopped kicking Uragami ascertained that, for geomantic reasons discernible to men of his genius, the child’s spirit is reluctant to be born. The birth henceforth depends on the mother’s will-power. (TA 4) The foregrounding of this domestic scene suggests a resistance to male-centric narratives of History. Orito attends a concubine, a woman whose status is secondary to that of the Magistrate’s first wife. Orito is herself a marginalised figure – her face disfigured by a large burn. They represent the kinds of women unrecorded in formal history, yet Mitchell positions them “centre-stage” as it were. The arrival of Jacob, the eponymous protagonist of the novel, is relegated to the mise-en-scene, as Orito briefly notices that “Abruptly, the frogs stop croaking and, as though a curtain of noise falls away, the sound of Nagasaki can be heard, celebrating the safe arrival of a Dutch ship” (TA 5). The strength and endurance of Kawasemi and Orito throughout the ordeal results in the birth and revival of the baby boy:

He inhales once; twice; three times; his crinkled face crumples … …and the shuddering newborn boiled-pink despot howls at Life. (TA 10) The boy is a “newborn […] despot”, the heir to a powerful man, and the scene of female intelligence and resilience is concluded with this reassertion of male privilege.

From the beginning of the novel the fate of Orito Aibagawa appears to be in the hands of men. Jacob’s access to Orito is controlled by Marinus, who is teaching her the art of medical science, and it is later revealed that her marriage to Ogawa Uzaemon, an honourable translator, had been prevented by his father, Ogawa Mimasaku. When her own father dies and she is forcefully recruited to the Sisterhood of Mount Shiranui Shrine, her only chance to avoid slavery is to accept the protection offered by Jacob in his proposal of marriage. Marriage is, in itself, a form of servitude, as the Sisters of Mount Shiranui observe: “Engiftment [impregnation by the monks] is an unusual duty, but is it so different from the duty any husband demands from his wife? The duty is certainly paid less often – much less” (TA 255). Nevertheless, she is abducted before she can reach Jacob, and her incarceration at the shrine appears irrevocable. The nuns of the shrine are impregnated by the monks and their children are taken away from them. The women believe that their sacrifice will bring fertility to the land, and that the children are placed in foster care. In truth, the monks ritually cannibalise the babies in order to prolong their own lives.

Jacob and Ogawa Uzaemon conspire to rescue Orito, construing her as the clichéd damsel in distress, a passive object to be desired and rescued by the story’s putative heroes. The novel does not follow the romance formula, however, and Orito is led to an escape passage by the moon grey cat that, as I have noted in earlier chapters, is a textual double for Mitchell himself. Orito does not follow the cat, but confronts her dilemma – if she flees and saves herself, she will condemn her friend Yayoi to a likely fatal labour: “‘The liberty of Aibagawa Orito,’ Orito speaks out loud, ‘is more important than the life of Yayoi and her twins.’ She examines the truth of the statement” (TA 308). Orito rejects the possibility of freedom offered by following the cat and reclaims a sense of control and agency amidst her incarceration. She threatens Enomoto with revealing the truth about the New Year’s letters (forgeries written ostensibly by the nuns’ relinquished children), and from this position of leverage she reframes the terms of her position at Mount Shiranui shrine. Enomoto is killed at the end of the novel by Magistrate Shiroyama, after he has been shown the Creeds of the Shrine of Mount Shiranui by Jacob de Zoet. These Creeds, which have been passed from Ogawa Uzaemon to Jacob, would not have been discovered if not for the actions of Otane the Healer, who in turn had received the Creeds from a dying apostate monk. There are many agents in the undoing of Enomoto, but Orito’s final liberation is not merely a consequence of the heroism of men. The scene of Enomoto’s death takes place around a game of Go, and concludes with the following image: “… a black butterfly lands on the White stone, and unfolds its wings” (TA 527). There are a number of ways to interpret this image. Shiroyama played with White, Enomoto with Black. The butterfly is a symbol of metamorphosis in Japanese culture, and is often considered to be a sign of a recently departed spirit.356 The image could therefore be read as a reaffirmation of Enomoto’s defeat by Shiroyama. Conversely, the juxtaposition of black and white (yin and yang) suggests that the butterfly (a symbol also associated with female coming-of age in Japan) represents a female presence (yin), which has been liberated as a result of Enomoto’s demise.

After the fall of Mount Shiranui, Orito continues her life as a midwife, elevated to the status of sensei (teacher), and in high demand in Edo and the Japanese medical community. Her life is devoted to women and the demystification (and therefore, improved conditions) of childbirth. As she explains to Jacob early in the novel, “‘I wish to build bridge from ignoration,’ her tapering hands form the bridge, ‘to knowledge’” (TA 76-7). Orito thus defies the stereotype that Marinus accuses Jacob of desiring:

It is not even Miss Aibagawa after whom you lust, in truth. It is the genus, “The Oriental Woman” who so infatuates you. Yes, yes, the mysterious eyes, the camellias in her hair, what you perceive as meekness. (TA 68) Orito is not defined by meekness but by strength, evinced in her first encounter with Jacob, in which he mistakes her for a man:

A second figure, momentarily blinded by the warehouse darkness, enters. His willowy chest is heaving with exertion. His blue kimono is covered with an artisan’s apron, spattered dark, and strands of hair have escaped from the headscarf that half conceals the right side of his face. Only when he steps into the shaft of light falling from the high window does Jacob see that the pursuer is a young woman. (TA 53) Orito’s demonstrable intellect, talent, and resilience confounds the misogynistic attitudes of the men of Dejima. When Dr Marinus asks Captain Lacey whether slaves have the right to vote in America, he elicits the following response: “‘No, Doctor,’ smiles Lacey. ‘Nor do their horses, oxen, bees or women’” (TA 57). Jacob himself reveals subconscious prejudice when he presumes Orito to be simply a courtesan’s handmaiden, “…a whore’s … helper” (TA 55).

The conclusion of the novel reasserts the primacy of Orito’s role. Jacob predicts his future as he leaves Japan for good. He imagines his deathbed: “The clock’s pendulum catches the firelight, and in the rattle-breathed final moments of Jacob de Zoet, amber

356 Stephenson Aung, “Motifs in Japanese Design,” Nalata/Nalata, August 15, 2015, accessed April 7, 2016, http://nalatanalata.com/journal/motifs-in-japanese-design/. shadows in the far corner coagulate into a woman’s form” (TA 546). He recognises the figure of Orito, with her headscarf, and “[…] sees himself, when he was young, in her narrow eyes” (TA 546). She kisses him on the forehead, and he passes away. The departure of his soul is described not through a Christian paradigm of death, but through Japanese imagery: “A well-waxed paper door slides open” (TA 546). Orito is an agent of birth (as a midwife) and death (an angelic vision at death’s door), in keeping with the Shinto concept – and a recurrent motif in the novel – that “Life and Death are indivisible” (TA 522). Jacob’s fascination with Japan is mirrored in his fascination with Orito. Dr Marinus perceives this dual fascination and, although he offers an unkind characterisation of Jacob’s affections, there is a degree of truth in his accusation.

I have argued that Mitchell reasserts the voices and perspectives of women in his historical novel, meanwhile drawing attention to the suppression of female perspectives and actors in History. A similar argument can be made for the role of slaves in the novel. The Dutch company employees treat the slaves with contempt and violence, citing racist, imperialist, and even scriptural rationales for the subjugation of darker- skinned people (TA 151-7). Van Cleef professes ambivalence towards slavery: “‘Slavery may be an injustice to some,’ says van Cleef, ‘but no one can deny that all Empires are founded upon the institution’” (TA 156). Recalling Cloud Atlas’s Dr Henry Goose, Van Cleef goes on to observe that:

In the animal kingdom [. . .] the vanquished are eaten by those more favoured by Nature. Slavery is merciful by comparison: the lesser races keep their lives in exchange for their labour. (TA 156) The notion that there are “lesser races” – a view which is also held by Japanese characters in the novel – is challenged by the characterisation of the black men Weh, Eelattu, and Hartlepool, amongst others. Although these minor characters are restricted in their capacity to influence the novel’s political milieu, Mitchell significantly includes a chapter narrated by Weh, which represents the sole departure from the third-person focalisation that occurs throughout the rest of the novel. This grants a particular kind of authority to Weh, insofar as he tells his own story without the mediation (and therefore control) of an omniscient narrator. This resonates with Weh’s reflections on the meaning of self-possession, as he laments that “‘No, a slave cannot even say, ‘These are my fingers,’ or ‘This is my skin.’ We do not own our bodies. We do not own our families’” (TA 368). Furthermore, Weh responds to whatever name his masters assign to him and, as Jacob observes, “To list and name people […] is to subjugate them” (TA 147). The name “Weh” resulted from a miscommunication between his former and current owners, and is the name of the man’s island of origin (so that, in some respects, he functions as a symbol of his people). He explains that “My true name I tell nobody, so nobody can steal my name”, and this privilege is preserved, as the reader is never informed of Weh’s true name (TA 369). Continuing this reverie, Weh recalls a conversation with Eelattu in which he asks whether a slave owns his own memories and his mind: “Eelattu answered, yes, my thoughts are born in my mind, so they are mine. Eelattu said that I can own my mind, if I choose” (TA 369). Eelattu’s advice implies the potential for one’s mind to be lost or “owned” by another – the ultimate form of domination and enslavement. The drugging of the Sisters of Mount Shiranui by the monks of the Shrine is a clear example of this kind of enslavement. Orito experiences extreme side-effects from the drugs she is forced to take: “These ‘slippages’ of time and senses, she is sure, are caused by the medicine Master Suzaku concocts for each Sister before supper. Hers the Master calls ‘Solace’” (TA 214). She loses control over her memory, she becomes addicted, and on occasion she finds herself “uttering her thoughts aloud” (TA 217). Her ability to control – and therefore “own” – her mind is thus compromised. The medicating of the Sisters reverberates with both the mind-dulling effects of “Soap” upon the fabricants, and the “Smoking School” enforced tobacco addiction of the Moriori depicted in Cloud Atlas. These kinds of addictions are dehumanising, and Orito recognises the correlation between the destruction of “spirit” and “enslavement” to consumption (TA 246). The need to consume is intrinsically human, and Mitchell identifies the ways in which consumer-culture warps this impulse as an effective method of control.

The challenge to conventional History via the accounts of minorities informs, in part, the novel’s fascination with the power of narratives and texts to shape identity and act as conduits to the past. There are numerous instances in The Thousand Autumns in which texts are represented as either life-giving or mortally dangerous. Jacob’s narrative begins with a crisis of faith that revolves around a text. The Shogun’s edict that no foreign religious activity or materials be permitted in Dejima requires him to relinquish his family’s psalter. He recalls the words of his uncle, who had passed on the psalter and informed him that: ‘It is a gift from your ancestors and a loan from your descendants. Whatever befalls you in the years ahead, never forget: this Psalter’ – he touched the canvas bag – ‘this is your passport home’ (TA 16). His uncle admonishes him to “Protect it with your life [so] that it may nourish your soul” (TA 17). The book is imbued with Jacob’s family history, his devotion to his faith, and indeed the health of his soul. His piety ensures that he obeys his uncle and smuggles the psalter into Dejima, risking his position with the Company, and his liberty throughout his posting in Japan. It is later revealed that Ogawa Uzaemon – the interpreter tasked with inspecting Jacob’s books – helps Jacob by overlooking the psalter (at great personal risk) because he is a self-professed “bibliophile” (TA 24). Uzaemon protects Jacob in the hope that he may access another item in Jacob’s collection: Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (TA 31). The discovery of the psalter (which is barely avoided when Jacob’s room is later ransacked by Inspector Kobayashi) would incur the penalty for treason – death – for Uzaemon. Jacob’s and Uzaemon’s bibliophilia initially unites them, yet their allegiance is uncomfortably reaffirmed through their mutual adoration for another “book” – Orito. Jacob’s attempts to meet Orito are thwarted initially by Marinus, who impugns the young man’s intentions. Jacob defends his interest in the midwife, recasting her “as a book whose cover fascinates, and in whose pages I desire to look, a little” (TA 69). Word and flesh become one as Jacob relishes pronouncing her name: “Ai, mouth opens; ba, lips meet; ga, tongue’s root; wa, lips” (TA 63). The sensual deconstruction of Orito’s name evokes the opening lines of Nabokov’s Lolita: “My sin, my soul Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth”.357

It is by means of a book that Jacob proposes to Orito – The New Dictionary of Dutch Language. Uzaemon remarks that “Dutch dictionary is magic key to open many lock doors” (TA 160). One such door is that of understanding. The dictionary encapsulates Jacob’s desire that Orito should understand his feelings. After she is inculcated into the Sisterhood, Jacob turns his attention to learning and understanding Japanese. His affection for Orito, mirrored with his infatuation with Japan, culminates in the composition of a Dutch-Japanese dictionary, which, as Orito informs him at the end of the novel, is commonly known as the “Dazûto”, the Japanese rendering of “de Zoet”

357 Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, (Camberwell: Penguin Books, 2008), 7. (TA 536). Thus Jacob becomes synonymous with a book that promotes understanding between two nations.

The most significant text described in the novel is the dogwood scroll enumerating the Twelve Creeds of the Shrine of Mount Shiranui. Acolyte Jiritsu transcribes the creeds and flees from the Shrine, remarking to Otane the healer, from whom he seeks refuge, that the act of writing flowed not from his consciousness, but that he was instead an agent of the text: “My hand, my brush: they knew before I did” (TA 210). Jiritsu is murdered for his betrayal, as is Otane for delivering the scroll to Uzaemon, who is also killed after reading the scroll and acting upon its contents. As previously mentioned, Magistrate Shiroyama sacrifices himself to avenge the women and children victimised by the Twelve Creeds. Proximity to the scroll invites death, such is the power of the written word, and Weh attributes a metaphysical malevolence to the object when he secretly observes Jacob studying its details:

I make this guess: Master de Zoet has been translating the scroll into his own language. This has freed a bad curse, and this bad curse has possessed him. (TA 373) The scroll is a threat not only to the novel’s protagonists, but also to Enomoto, the original source of the Twelve Creeds. He loses control of the interpretation and evaluation of the creeds once they are transcribed, and they are ultimately used against him. This text, in effect, figuratively strives for the death of the author.

Jacob’s regard for his psalter, as an incarnation of his own being and a reminder of his identity as a Christian and a de Zoet, speaks to the significance of narrative in affirming conceptions of the self. The New Year letters provide the Sisters of Shiranui Shrine with a similar kind of affirmation; hence “Orito understands that the New Year letters are the Sisters’ purest Solace” (TA 252). Solace, of course, is the name accorded to Orito’s “medicine” and the letters are similarly designed to subdue the Sisters, as Orito discovers when she attempts to escape the Shrine. Master Chimei fabricates letters from the “Gifts” – the babies borne and given up by the Sisters. On a peripheral note, Master Chimei’s commentary on creative writing invokes Don DeLillo’s analogy of writers as “donut-makers”: “Storytellers are not priests who commune with an ethereal realm, but artisans, like dumpling-makers, if somewhat slower” (TA 302).358 Chimei, like Mitchell

358 Mitchell is alluding to Don DeLillo, Mao II, (New York: Random House, 2011), 162. and DeLillo, bring together pre-existing “ingredients” and craft them into a consumable and nourishing product. As Marinus informs Jacob, “The printed word is food […] and you look hungry, Domburger” (TA 165). The Sisters are consoled by the letters they receive from the children they are forced to give up, and they take comfort in each other:

It is stories, [Orito] believes, that make life in the House of Sisters tolerable, stories in all their forms: the Gift’s letters, tittle-tattle, recollections and tall tales like Hatsune’s singing skull. She thinks of myths of gods, of Izanami and Izanagi, of Buddha and Jesus; and perhaps the Goddess of Mount Shiranui, and wonders whether the same principle is not at work. (TA 277) Orito’s reflections correspond with Luisa Rey’s assertion in Ghostwritten that “the human world is made of stories, not people” (GW 386). The importance of narrative, in this case, is not to communicate an absolute concept of truth, but to make sense of existence. The implication that Buddha, Jesus, and religion in general are narrative constructs designed to make life tolerable reinforce a postmodern position on the artifice of metanarratives, as well as their attractiveness and potency in human society. The notion of the Self is scrutinised in this context, and:

Orito pictures the human mind as a loom that weaves disparate threads of belief, memory and narrative into an entity whose common name is Self, and which sometimes calls itself Perception. (TA 277) A coherent, holistic sense of self is destabilised in this image of the loom. The self is constructed, woven perhaps, from extrinsic narratives as much as intrinsic impulses, and is always in-process. Marinus declares that “The soul is a verb […] not a noun”, and Jiritsu asks despondently “Are we no more than the totality of our acts?” (TA 166, 209). The verb Marinus refers to, is perhaps “to weave”, if I may adopt Orito’s analogy. The crux of the Self and Perception is the act of storytelling - the act of making meaning by merging narratives, memories and beliefs into a coherent tale. Humans are defined by the stories they tell and the metanarratives they adhere to, hence the importance that all voices contribute to narratives of history. The obfuscation of the voices of women and ethnic minorities from history signifies a devaluation of these identities, an erasure of the stories that affirm their perception and experience, and a violent obstruction preventing these people from participating in a fundamentally human practice. In short, it relegates these voices to the subhuman, and it is no coincidence that women, people of colour, and the working class are depicted in The Thousand Autumns as slaves or in conditions akin to slavery.

The substance of the narratives that form selfhood is therefore of vital moral importance, and The Thousand Autumns examines the metanarratives provided by different religions. In this and Mitchell’s other works religious extremism is admonished, but not religion per se. The two religious figures of motherhood evoked in The Thousand Autumns – the Goddess and Mother Mary – provide an apt comparison of how religious devotion and zeal can result in starkly different attitudes to human life. The Goddess’ ability to grant life derives from the blood of the murdered, she is not fertile, rather she is able to manipulate the ki of different beings. The Goddess is characterised as a malevolent entity, and Orito and Juritsu report a sensation of menace when they come into contact with her. Jiritsu attributes spiritual power to the Goddess, and expresses his good fortune that the Goddess did not notice when he recorded the Creeds for “She must have been occupied elsewhere or she would have killed me on the spot” (TA 210). The Goddess inspires barbarism, whereas the Mother Mary – the idol of Otane the Healer – encourages selfless kindness. Otane is a secret Christian, like her ancestors, practising her faith devoutly despite the Shogun’s moratorium on foreign religions. Otane’s Christianity focuses on Mary, by contrast to Jacob and the other Christians who refer mainly to Jesus and God the Father:

In this small and secret space stands the true treasure of Otane’s cottage and bloodline: a white-glazed, blue-veiled, dirt-cracked statuette of Mari-sama, the Mother of Iesu-sama and Empress of Heaven, crafted long ago to resemble Kannon, the Goddess of Mercy. (TA 207) Otane’s Christianity is mediated by the mythology and culture of Japan just as, in the end, Jacob’s Protestantism allows for the iconography of Eastern mysticism (such as the image of the wax-paper door as a symbol for heaven). The inclusivity of Jacob and Otane’s positions, in conjunction with their selfless natures, is an acceptance of moderate religious belief. The novel, however, depicts inter-religious hostility as a foundation for conceiving of otherness, and one means by which notions of cultural and racial superiority are justified. Marinus articulates this critique to Jacob, observing that “[…] we have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love” (TA 452). On the subject of religion Mitchell has stated that

I’m not a Christian, but I dislike the current trend in British culture to trash Christian faith, which has, and does, inspire devout people to perform acts of humanism, from the abolition of slavery to the provision of AIDS orphanages in places nobody else ventures. Of course Christianity can also inspire far less praiseworthy acts too, but these instances get plenty of airplay in secular societies. In Jacob I wanted to create a character who was steeped in Protestantism, but who was also worthy of respect. Marinus isn’t a Christian, but he believes in belief.359 The Thousand Autumns offers a number of meditations on the concept of belief, in terms which support a postmodern scepticism about the verifiability of any one worldview. Marinus remarks to Jacob at one point that “So little is actually worthy of either belief or disbelief. Better to strive to co-exist, than to seek to disprove” (TA 504). Yoshida, Mitchell’s fictional historian, identifies the foundation of belief that underscores all systems of social and military politics:

‘The present is a battleground,’ Yoshida straightens his spine as best he can, ‘where rival what-ifs compete to become the future “what is”. How does one what-if prevail over its adversaries? The answer -’ the sick man coughs ‘– the answer, “Military and political power, of course!” is a postponement, for, what is it that directs the minds of the powerful? The answer is “Belief”. Beliefs that are ignoble or idealistic; democratic or Confucian; Occidental or Oriental; timid or bold; clear-sighted or delusional’. (TA 232) He continues by identifying political science and philosophy as disciplines in which narratives of belief are constructed:

Power is informed by Belief that this path, and not another, must be followed. What, then, or where, is the womb of Belief? What, or where, is the crucible of ideology? Academicians of Shirandô, I put it to you that we are one such crucible. We are one such womb. (TA 232) In my discussion of Cloud Atlas, I argued that Mitchell is advocating new ways to consider the future by exposing the limitations of current narratives of fate. The emphasis on the artifice of narrative recurs in The Thousand Autumns, and once again Mitchell attributes to narratives the power to reimagine new possible pathways and

359 David Mitchell, “David Mitchell, The Art of Fiction No. 204”. outcomes for the future. Ironically, this potential is articulated by Master Chimei, ventriloquising Sister Hatsune’s child, Noriko in one of the “New Year Letters”:

Looking at these lines, my words read like a dreaming girl’s. Perhaps, Mother, this is the greatest gift our correspondence gives us: a space in which we can dream. (TA 252) These metafictional reveries privilege narrative as the foundation of human experience. It is significant, therefore, that a poem – an ode to Dejima and Nagasaki – is subtly injected into the prose of the third section. Although the poem is in open form, and not divided into lines or stanzas, it can be identified as such through the use of rhyme. The poem follows the flight of gulls over Nagasaki, describing the landscape and enumerating the inhabitants and their activities, such as “[…] potters; barbers; hawkers of oil; tanners; cutlers; carters of night-soil” and so on (TA 516). The poem culminates in a return to Magistrate Shiroyama’s perspective, and he observes the gulls and reflects that “This world […] contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself” (TA 516). Patrick O’Donnell interprets the poem as a metaphor of the novel itself, observing that:

With this invocation of the multitude, The Thousand Autumns establishes its realism as a pastiche of imbricated worlds, small and large, and its plot a migratory itinerary of realms that reveal their variant mutuality and separation.360 O’Donnell’s analysis of the novel emphasises this idea of “imbricated worlds” and the novel’s depiction of translation and miscommunication. The presence of translators is integral to the plot development of the novel, and instances of confusion underscore the cultural divide that separates the different “worlds” of the Dutch, English, and the Japanese. Affinity and understanding are nevertheless achieved through translation, hence O’Donnell argues that “[…] difference, per se, is what gets both lost and made visible in translation”.361 Dejima exemplifies planetary space, containing within its walls a series of realms (geographically-bounded cultures) that simultaneously clash and interpenetrate; the different never dissolve into easy assimilation with each other. Communication and miscommunication – the overtly dominant themes in Black Swan Green – are the media through which affinity and difference are determined, and The Thousand Autumns explores the phenomenon of orientalism in this collision of worlds.

360 Patrick O’Donnell, A Temporary Future: The Fiction of David Mitchell, 132. 361 Ibid., 145. The diversity of voices represented in the novel draws attention to the limitations of individual perspectives. Mitchell’s novel implies that there is an almost universal instinct to regard the racially different as a kind of “other”. The Japanese and the Dutch both generalise the appearance of members of the opposite race. White men are nicknamed “redheads”. As van Cleef says to Jacob:

‘“Kômô” is how Europeans are often dubbed: kô signifying “red”; and “mô”, hair. Few of us, in truth, do boast hair of your tint; a genuine “red-haired barbarian” is worth a good gawp’. (TA 22) Stereotypically, the Japanese are denigated by the Dutch as “slit-eyed” (TA 11). Japanese and Dutch characters alike regard each other as being goblin-like. Jacob recognises that racial prejudice is extant in all cultural groups when observing small Japanese children circling their eyes with their hands. He “realises they are impersonating ‘round’ European eyes and remembers a string of urchins following a Chinaman in London” who “pulled their eyes into narrow slants” (TA 44). Nevertheless, the novel accords a certain kind of mysticism to Japan, its people and its land. In spite of his devout Christian beliefs, Jacob ruminates that “here, notions of transmigrations, of karma, which are heresies at home, possess a – a”, Marinus completes the sentence, suggesting: “a plausibility?” (TA 505). Mitchell himself has acknowledged the novel’s tendency to romanticise the Orient:

We all romanticize our youth, but when East Asia is intertwined with youth, the wistfulness and the sense of loss are amplified – for reasons which Edward Said might have scorned.362 He has also noted, however, that the setting of “Dejima inverts the common Orientalist terms – on this tiny man-made island, it was the whites who were corralled, fleeced, and exoticized”.363 In effect, and as will be discussed in greater depth in my analysis of The Bone Clocks, Mitchell is cautious about demystifying Japan and preserving the sense of “unknowability” about the place, thereby reinforcing its orientalist mystique. Jacob concludes as he sails away from Dejima that “obscurity is Japan’s outermost defence. The country doesn’t want to be understood” (TA 543). This accords with Mitchell’s own reflections on living in Japan, which he defines as a “club” country: “‘Club’ countries define foreignness by lineage or passport – it will never matter what you do, how well you learn the language, how many soccer teams or famous department stores

362 David Mitchell, “David Mitchell, The Art of Fiction No. 204,” 21-22 363 Ibid., 19. you buy – you are foreign and always will be”.364 If Jacob’s and Orito’s relationship can be read as a metaphor for the foreigner’s affection for the Orient, it is meaningful that the only scene of physical intimacy between the two is one in which Orito is metaphorically conflated with her gift of a persimmon:

Lacking a knife or spoon, he takes a nip of waxy skin between his incisors, and tears; juice oozes from the gash; he licks the sweet smears and sucks out a dribbling gobbet of threaded flesh and holds it gently, gently, against the roof of his mouth, where the pulp disintegrates into fermented jasmine, oily cinnamon, perfumed melon, melted damson . . . and in its heart he finds ten or fifteen flat stones, brown as Asian eyes and the same shape. (TA 146) There is an undeniable eroticism in this act of consumption, yet it does not satiate Jacob’s longing for Orito, which he predicts will stay with him until death. The persimmon scene is a carnal rendering of the kind of approximation that occurs in translation. Jacob enjoys an unprecedented closeness with Japan’s “club” culture, but he never achieves social belonging, nor does his half-Japanese son born to a prostitute, Yuan.

The collision of worlds in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is no more apparent than in the way time is measured and colonised in the novel. There is a profound invocation of temporal hybridity, achieved through references to reincarnation, multiple calendars, Jacob’s imagined return to the Netherlands, the political strategies to determine the future, and the palimpsest of short narratives that interrupt the narrative proper. The chapters in the novel are given titles that specify the location of the chapter’s events and are dated in accordance with the Japanese calendar. For example, the first chapter is titled “The House of Kawasemi the Concubine, above Nagasaki: The Ninth Night of the Fifth Month”. This method of naming chapters reinforces the dominant political system of the novel’s setting – Japan – yet also disrupts the (Western) reader’s conceptualisation of the era. That is to say, the measurement of time cannot be neutral as different populations create calendars according to their specific cultural and religious ideals. A key feature of the mise-en-scene of the novel is the Ryûgaji Temple, which intones a bell according to the traditional Japanese temporal hour system. Captain Penhaligon identifies the relation between the measurement of time and power, remarking that:

364 Mitchell, David. “Japan and My Writing”, Japan Railway & Transport Review 42, (2005), 60. Our mission here, men, is to bring the Nineteenth Century to these benighted shores. By the “Nineteenth Century” I mean the British Nineteenth Century: not the French, nor Russian nor Dutch. (TA 449) Penhaligon recognises that Japan is outside the Western “Nineteenth Century”, not merely because it regulated time via a luni-solar calendar, but because the nation did not engage in the open trade practices or technology of the West (in particular, the use of guns). A “British Nineteenth Century” can only refer to one in which the British Empire successfully colonises the globe and imposes its laws and social practices upon its subjects. The threat of Empire is identified in the novel by Yoshida Hayata, a scholar whose lecture is attended by Jacob, Marinus, and Ogawa Uzaemon. Yoshida observes that “To avoid becoming a European colony, we need colonies of our own” (TA 230). He adds that “[…] new machines of power are shaping the world”, and that (TA 231-2):

People who do not acquire these machines of power are, at best, subjugated, like the Indians. At worst, like the natives of Van Diemen’s Land, they are exterminated. (TA 232) Although Penhaligon ultimately fails to introduce Japan to the “British Nineteenth Century”, his attack on Nagasaki anticipates the historically more successful operation in Edo Bay by US Commodore Matthew Perry in 1852. Perry forced Japan into a trade agreement, effectively ending the closed border policy of the Tokugawa era. The novel thus has the atmosphere of a fin-de-siecle, undermining the permanence and durability of empires and grand civilisations. Yoshida’s aforementioned lecture on power, belief, and governmental policy is pertinent at this historical moment in which there is no inevitable future; rather, competing contenders for supremacy. O’Donnell argues that Mitchell “[…] [frames] temporality as a narrative construct that changes according to varying cultural systems, genres, and experiences”.365 Marinus, as will be revealed in The Bone Clocks, experiences time differently from the other characters (excepting Enomoto), as he has lived several lifetimes in different cultures prior to his incarnation as the Doctor in Dejima. Weh detects Marinus’ unusual temporal condition, speculating that:

His skin is a White man’s, but through his eyes you can see his soul is not a White man’s soul. His soul is much older. On Weh, we would call him a kwaio. A kwaio is an ancestor who does not stay on the island of ancestors. A kwaio returns and returns and returns,

365 Patrick O’Donnell, A Temporary Future: The Fiction of David Mitchell, 143. each time in a new child. A good kwaio may become a shaman, but nothing in this world is worse than a bad kwaio. (TA 370) Enomoto is a “bad kwaio” and his presence provokes unease. Shiroyama’s dying thoughts are dedicated to deconstructing the Abbott, his enemy, and the Magistrate reflects:

Some say, Shiroyama’s body turns to stone, that there is no afterlife. Some say that human beings are no more eternal than mice or mayflies. But your eyes, Enomoto, prove that Hell is no invention, for Hell is reflected in them. (TA 527) Shiroyama’s words are ambiguous as to whether Enomoto is destined for an eternity in hell, or whether his spirit is imbued with lifetimes of evil. Enomoto strives for the immortality that Marinus involuntarily endures, and he obscures the evil of his monastery with the aesthetics of Shintoism and Buddhism; hence the image of perpetual regeneration occurs in close association with the Shrine of Mount Shiranui. A ritual is held at the Shrine in front of a statue of “the Goddess”:

The Goddess is disrobed for the Annunciation of Engifting: her exposed breasts are ample with milk; and her belly, devoid of a navel, is swollen with a female foetus so fertile, according to Abbess Izu, that the foetus’s own tiny womb encloses a still smaller female foetus, which is, in turn, impregnated with a still smaller daughter...and so on, to infinity. (TA 242) This image recalls that of the matryoshka doll in Cloud Atlas, which I discussed in the fourth chapter of this thesis. The Goddess, however, is less a font of life than a parasite. Rather than producing life in its multiplicity, she is the great homogeniser, consuming the souls of the vulnerable to preserve the lifespan of the elite few. Rather than Marinus’ cyclical existence, however, the monks are preserved in their current states, unable to develop. This sense of stasis is applicable, at different junctures, to the VOC and Japan. The central office for the company is flanked with an “Antechamber of Bottles”. Jacob observes:

In the Antechamber of Bottles outside the State Room, a wall of fifty or sixty glass demijohns, wired tight against earthquakes, exhibit creatures from the Company’s once-vast empire. Preserved from decay by alcohol, pig-bladder and lead, they warn not so much that all flesh perishes – what sane adult forgets this truth for long? – but that immortality comes at a steep price. (TA 37) Jacob’s reflections are possibly proleptic of the Faustian exchange which Enomoto makes with the Goddess. It is symbolic, however, that this room of preserved creatures is situated outside the main office of the VOC in Dejima. During the end of the seventeenth century, the Company was in decline. Justus M Van der Kroef explains in his discussion of the VOC that “Despite the insistence of Governor-General van Imhoff that the chief reason for the Company’s decline was her ‘refusal to open up the trade with the Indies, a method through which other nations have by-passed us,’ the Company never altered her commercial course”.366 Similarly, the Japanese policy of closed borders is critiqued by one character in the novel as a dangerous form of inertia: “‘The Third Shogun closed the country to prevent Christian rebellions,’ argues Aodo the historian, ‘but its result was to pickle Japan in a specimen jar!’” (TA 231). Immortality does not equate to invincibility and, in the cases of Enomoto, the VOC, and the Shogun, antipathy to development and change lead to their ultimate demise. In the words of Otane the Healer: “Fire consumes wood […] and time consumes us” (TA 211 – emphasis in original).

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is characterised by plurality, evinced in the colliding cultures, multiple perspectives, and the collation of different genres in the novel. The powerful agents in the novel – and the nations and cultures that they represent – jostle for control and purposefully submerge the voices of the “other”. The right to control the narrative of goodness, as it were, is the power to determine the future. O’Donnell has identified narratives of utopian futures in the novel, and argues that:

Mitchell thus reveals once more the tenuous relation between narrative transmission and human survival drawn in Cloud Atlas, where transmigratory stories essential to the continuance of collective identity are set alongside fictions of a utopian future issuing forth from the machinery of enslavement in the utilitarian destruction of human life.367 One such utopic narrative is that of national prosperity, epitomised in the novel’s engagement with, and allusion to, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Enomoto expresses regard for Smith’s monograph, and associates his demonic spiritual practice with Smith’s pragmatism:

366 Justus M. Van der Kroef, “The Decline and Fall of the Dutch East India Company,” The Historian 10, no. 2 (1948), 131. 367 Patrick O’Donnell, A Temporary Future: The Fiction of David Mitchell, 136. Survival is Nature’s law, and my Order holds – or, better, is – the secret of surviving mortality. Newborn infants are a messy requisite – after the first two weeks of life, the enmeshed soul can’t be extracted – and a fifty-strong Order needs a constant supply for its own use, and to purchase the favours of an elite few. Your Adam Smith would understand. Without the Order, moreover, the Gifts wouldn’t exist in the first place. They are an ingredient we manufacture. (TA 361) The outrage Uzaemon – and the reader – experience in response to Enomoto’s institutionalised practice of rape and infanticide is inspired by the laissez-faire attitude to human life. It derives from an interpretation of Smith that emphasises the premise of self-interest, for, as Smith contends, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest”.368 Enomoto is justifying his self-interest as the natural way of human existence, reasoning that his success contributes to the ultimate social good vis-à-vis Smith’s theory of the “invisible hand”:

By preferring the support of domestick to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.369 Mitchell’s invocation of Smith is not to align him with the predatory machinations of men such as Enomoto and Vorstenbosch, or to justify evil in the name of the free market. Rather, this narrow interpretation of Smith’s ideas – the distortion of his narrative of economics, as it were – can be dangerous (and in the context of this novel it is important to note that The Theory of Moral Sentiments in which Smith elaborates on the moral and altruistic capabilities of the human, is not considered). In keeping with Mitchell’s scepticism regarding the democratisation of trade (which I discussed in my analysis of Cloud Atlas), the novel privileges the actions of the individual, rather than the mechanics of a social system. The versions of utopia envisioned by each invested party in the novel, and the kind promoted by Smith’s theory of national prosperity require the subjugation or exclusion of another party. It is only when Jacob assembles the VOC members on Dejima to defy the Pheobus, in a small, temporary and democratic “Republic”, that equity and community are cultivated. Jacob’s bravery in the

368 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 22. 369 Ibid., 292. face of the English invaders ensures their victory, and it is his presence on the watchtower of Dejima that quells Penhaligon’s rage and prompts him to abandon Nagasaki:

De Zoet removes his hat; his hair is as copper, untameable, bedraggled...... and Penhaligon sees Tristram, his beautiful, one-and-only red- haired son, waiting for death… (TA 499) Jacob unknowingly appeals to Penhaligon’s nostalgia, and the battle is ended. The scene emphasises the significance of the (seemingly unimportant) individual’s defiance. Enomoto is defeated by a group of individuals working independently towards a collective goal. His regime of slavery is ended, yet undergirding the novel is the spectre of slavery in Dejima and beyond. A discussion of slavery and abolition in the novel does not result in any form of activism on Jacob’s behalf. Orito’s forced servitude to the Shrine is only contested by Uzaemon and Jacob after they discover the Creeds. The invisibility of the Shrine ensures its security, yet the exploitation of slaves and workers on Dejima is made visible throughout the novel. Jacob eventually apologises to Orito, confessing to her that “The day I understood what my inaction had exposed you to, was the worst day of my life” (TA 537). Orito appeases his guilt, reflecting that:

When pain is vivid, when decisions are keen-edged, we believe that we are the surgeons. But time passes, and one sees the whole more clearly, and now I perceive us as surgical instruments used by the world to excise itself of the Order of Mount Shiranui. Had you given me sanctuary that day, I would have been spared pain, yes, but Yayoi would still be a prisoner there. The Creeds would still be enforced. How can I forgive you when you did nothing wrong? (TA 538) Orito’s response to Jacob is sincere, and yet the most significant moment of heroism in the novel is her own decision to disregard self-interest and return to the Shrine.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a work of historiographic metafiction that self-reflexively engages with how narratives produce versions of history that inform notions of the self, notions of good and evil, and credible paths of action to determine the future. The collision of cultures, languages, and temporalities highlight the connections and disconnections between people, and the ways in which narrative can produce affinity. The planetary scope of the novel is achieved by the multitude of different narrators of different nationalities amongst whom the narrative weaves. Finally, this novel artfully reasserts the voices of the dispossessed, and emphasises the power of individual actions in the face of systemic injustice. It advances the politics of Mitchell’s oeuvre, including his critique of capitalism as a system designed to benefit the few and oppress the many, and promotes the interconnections between humans without obviating their differences in favour of a totalising metanarrative of truth.

Invisible Wars and Planetary Saviours in The Bone Clocks “‘World’s changin’,’ she said. ‘even here. Can’t stop it.’” – Esther Little

In his sixth novel, The Bone Clocks, Mitchell returned to the experimental structuring that characterised Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas. The narrative spans nearly sixty years, beginning in 1984 in the English county of Kent, and concluding in the Cork region of Ireland in the year 2043. Unlike Cloud Atlas, however, the novel’s six sections proceed in a chronologically linear direction, with expository flashbacks as necessary. The novel coheres through the central character of Holly Sykes, although she narrates only the first and final sections, each of the other narrators having some sort of intimate connection with her. The time span of The Bone Clocks (with flashbacks from prehistory to the near future) encapsulates a planetary vision of civilisations and their engagement with the environment.

As with Mitchell’s previous works, The Bone Clocks manifests the central theme of humanity’s capacity for predation, both literal and metaphorical. The dual nature of humanity is articulated by the benign supernatural figure, Iris Marinus Fenby, who declares that “Human cruelty can be infinite. Human generosity can be boundless”.370 Iris Fenby is one of a number of reincarnations in this novel of Lukas Marinus, who first appeared in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. The immortal Marinus and his/her fellow Horologists are engaged in a centuries-long battle with predatory beings called the “Anchorites”. The Horologists and the Anchorites are paradigmatic of human generosity and cruelty, respectively. Although the over-arching plot of the novel is concerned with the battle between these supernatural forces of good and evil, this is superseded in the final section by a futuristic vision of environmental catastrophe brought about by the reckless consumerism and greed of human beings. Once again, Mitchell depicts our species’ self-destructiveness in precarious balance with the capacity for life-affirming self-sacrifice.

The first section of the novel, “A Hot Spell”, is narrated by Holly as a rebellious fifteen year old about to learn that she has been betrayed by her older boyfriend and her putative “best friend”. The second section, entitled “Myrrh is Mine, Its Bitter Perfume”, is set seven years later in 1991 and narrated by an amoral Cambridge student named

370 David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks, (London: Sceptre, 2014), 54. Further references to this edition will be included in the text in parentheses with the acronym “BC”. Hugo Lamb. When Hugo accompanies his wealthy friends on a skiing holiday in Switzerland, he romantically pursues Holly, who is working in the village as a barmaid. On their first, and as it turns out only, night together, they watch a videotape of “Between Two Worlds”. Although the film is not named, this intertextual inclusion is characteristic of Mitchell, insofar as it anticipates the fateful choice which Hugo is about to be offered. The third section, “The Wedding Bash”, is set in 2004, and narrated by Holly’s husband. In the first section, Ed Brubeck was Holly’s classmate and ally. Now he is a reporter with an award-winning career established in war zones. The fourth section, “Crispin Hershey’s Lonely Planet”, covers the period from May 2015 to December 2010. The eponymous narrator is a once-celebrated writer who has reached crises in both his personal and professional lives. Initially jealous of Holly’s success – she is now the successful author of a “spiritual memoir” – Crispin becomes one of her most staunch friends. The penultimate section, “An Horologist’s Labyrinth”, is set in 2015 and narrated by Marinus. In this chapter the final battle between the “Horologists” and the “Anchorites” takes place, the evil Anchorites ultimately being defeated against the odds. However, as the final part of the novel, “Sheep’s Head”, makes clear, the human race is more likely than supernatural forces to instigate its own disaster.

In 2043 as Mitchell imagines it, the world is entering a new dark age as technology has largely broken down, essential resources are dwindling, and communities are threatened by lawless outsiders. As Geordie Williamson remarked of 2015, “This is the year of climate change literature”.371 Although he went on to cite Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy rather than David Mitchell, the latter’s novels are indeed both symptomatic of and contributing to a zeitgeist in this regard.372 As David Ignatius observed in an opinion piece entitled “The moral issue of climate change”:

Mitchell’s book […] might just become the “1984” of the climate change movement. It dramatizes the consequences of our improvident modern economy in the way George Orwell’s novel awakened people to the “Big Brother” mentality of Soviet communism.373

371 Geordie Williamson, , “The Best Books of 2015”, The Weekend Australian, December 19-20, 2015, accessed August 1, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/david-ignatius-the-moral-issue-of- climate-change/2014/11/18/e660e61c-6f74-11e4-ad12-3734c461eab6_story.html. 372 Ibid. 373 Ibid. The conclusion of The Bone Clocks, in which Holly’s grandchildren are offered the hope of survival by a deus ex machina, recalls that of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, in which an unspecified event evidently brought about by human error has effectively rendered the Earth uninhabitable.374

The environmental crisis depicted in the novel’s denouement leaves a lasting impression; it is an admonition against the fate of humanity, should humans persist in unsustainable practices. The novel proposes that these practices have become the norm under late capitalism. Although the ecological concerns of the novel are paramount, Mitchell portrays other circumstances in which a social order or ideology is naturalised, often resulting in the suppression of the other (which returns to consciousness with uncanny effect). That is to say, Mitchell’s novel is interested in the way injustices in society are normalised, concealed, and wilfully ignored. The Bone Clocks traverses many scenarios in which oppression and the workings of power have been naturalised and are consequently “invisible”. The fantasy storyline about an “invisible war” between supernatural powers can be read as an analogy to such invisible conflicts and suppressions in societies across the globe. Mitchell has confirmed the metaphorical nature of his novel in an interview with Paul Harris for the journal SubStance, in which he stated that “Horologists [. . .] are metaphors for mortals”.375 This remark must be understood within the context of the interview, which is focused on the nature of time and how perceptions of life and identity are shaped by the experience of time. Nevertheless, the Horologists (and their enemies, the Anchorites) are representative of humanity in a much broader sense, and the novel is ultimately focused upon the human. After all, the title The Bone Clocks is a reference to the Horologists’ term for “normal” human beings. The supernatural war that underpins the events of the novel is, most importantly, allegorical. It directs the reader’s attention to the seemingly invisible – to the oppressiveness of falsely naturalised social structures based on hierarchies of wealth or racial origin, the neglect of victims of war in the third world, and the continued denigration of the environment. Patrick O’Donnell has discussed the resonances between The Bone Clocks and Louis Althusser’s critique of the artifice of social

374 Cormack McCarthy, The Road, (London: Picador, 2007). 375 Paul Harris,. “David Mitchell in the Laboratory of Time: An Interview with the Author,” SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism 44, no. 1 (2015), 13. orders.376 O’Donnell identifies the uncanny emergence of the voice of the other that has been suppressed by the social order:

The ‘other’ narratives of the novel – whether the horrific and grotesque scenes of war in the Middle East, depictions of conflicts between entities operating in another spatiotemporal dimension, hallucinatory memories of redacted experiences, or the voice and memory of an alterity hiding within – intrude upon those taking place in conventional settings, giving the lie to the ‘naturalness’ or ‘truth’ associated with realism.377 The following discussion of The Bone Clocks will treat the six chapters of the novel in turn. Particular emphasis will be placed on the different manifestations of “an alterity hiding within”. The successive examples of the suppressed “Other” in varying forms (such as the poor, the elderly, the Indigenous, and more) effectively pave the way for Mitchell’s definitive statement on the planet, which is refigured as a kind of Other that is silently exploited and suppressed under the culture of late capitalism. These portraits (which I will discuss in terms of the uncanny) ultimately speak to the nature of identity in the postmodern world. The existence of a suppressed other, or a kind of alterity, reflects an oppositional or fragmented state of affairs characteristic of postmodernism. This chapter will, therefore, extend beyond the identification of alterity and the uncanny, to consider how Mitchell depicts the postmodern condition, with particular reference to what extent time and the experience of time moulds identity.

My analysis of The Bone Clocks must be prefaced with an elaboration on the meaning of the “uncanny”. In German, the word for uncanny is “unheimlich”, roughly translatable as “unfamiliar”. The word “unfamiliar” or “unheimlich” necessarily incorporates that to which it expresses opposition – one has to have a sense of what is “familiar’ in order to understand what is unfamiliar. For Freud, the uncanny is the resurfacing of the repressed. Subsequent theorists have, however, suggested a number of other dimensions to the uncanny. Robin Lyndenberg argues that the uncanny is an experience when “what is most intimately known and familiar, then, is […] divided within by something potentially alien and threatening”.378 Francesco Ricatti suggests that a moment of truth is uncanny as “it lets us experience the familiar from a new and unexpected perspective, or conversely relates something unfamiliar to our deepest

376 Patrick O’Donnell, A Temporary Future: The Fiction of David Mitchell, 174. 377 Ibid., 174-5. 378 Robin Lyndenberg, “Freud’s Uncanny Narratives,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 112, no. 5 (1997),1073. knowledge and emotional understanding of life and society”.379 Lacan, Dolar, Turcotte, Rando and Ricatti have discussed the relationship between the uncanny and spectrality. Without delving too far into this issue, it is pertinent to a discussion of The Bone Clocks that, in Ricatti’s words, “The uncanny Other comes to occupy a liminal space between the living and the dead, not only in gothic literature but in the colonial representation of the Indigenous Other as spectre”.380 There are a few things to note here – first, the allusion to the uncanny as associated with the genre of gothic literature, a genre that specifically responds to the “advent of modernity”.381 Modernity, in this context, can be understood as the technological transformation of society and the changes in cultural attitudes and values that accompany this transformation. The uncanny creature or monster in gothic literature can, as Dolar states, “stand for everything that our culture has to repress – the proletariat, sexuality, other cultures, alternate ways of living, heterogeneity, the Other”.382 I want to emphasise this point, as it is a critical component of my argument that the uncanny is politically significant in Mitchell’s fiction. The second point of interest is Ricatti’s assertion that the trope of the Indigenous spectre is characteristic of colonial literature. In the analysis to come, I will consider the lens of genre and the question of whether authenticity really demands this kind of characterisation of Indigeneity.

As already mentioned, Holly Sykes is the individual point of reference within a novel which is more concerned with events on the global stage. This is a postmodern approach to characterisation insofar as the protagonist’s view of the self is not privileged or given authority over the accounts of others; the story of Holly is not self-determined. A discrete sense of individuality and isolation from the world (in the Heideggerean sense) is undermined by the dispersal of the narrative. That is to say, the defining events of Holly’s life often unfold outside of her knowledge, and therefore control. This technique of characterisation underscores the novel’s preoccupation with the power of seemingly invisible or repressed forces in shaping and directing both the individual’s and humanity’s future. The individual is effectively re-contextualised as a constituent of a planetary system. The first chapter introduces this theme by juxtaposing class warfare

379 Francesco Ricatti, “The Emotion of Truth and the Racial Uncanny: Aborigines and Sicilians in Australia,” Cultural Studies Review 19, no.2 (2013), 130 380 Ibid., 136. 381 Mladen Dolar, “‘I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding-Night’: Lacan and the Uncanny,” October 58, (1991), 7. 382 Ibid., 19. in Britain with the war between the Anchorites and the Horologists. The chapter revisits the political context of Black Swan Green, set as it is in an English town in the early 1980s. Holly Sykes, a child just two years older than Jason Taylor, runs away from home after a fight with her mother. She hitches a ride with a young socialist couple and their conversation turns to politics:

‘An invisible war’s going on,’ says Heidi, which confuses me till I realise she doesn’t mean the slow traffic, ‘and all through history – the class war. Owners versus slaves, nobles versus serfs, the bloated bosses versus workers, the haves versus the have-nots. The working classes are kept in a state of repression by a mixture of force and lies.’ (BC 52) Heidi’s bluntly ideological conception of class warfare recalls many of the power struggles explored in Mitchell’s oeuvre. Holly observes “a bunch of union men [. . .] collecting money in buckets for the striking miners with Socialist Workers holding signs saying COAL NOT DOLE and THATCHER DECLARES WAR ON THE WORKERS” (BC 10). Making explicit the critique of unreflecting consumerism conveyed in Black Swan Green, Heidi’s boyfriend Ian identifies capitalism as a system of oppression, citing the “great lie” that “happiness is about borrowing money you haven’t got to buy crap you don’t need” (BC 52). The stakeholders in capitalism simultaneously maintain a system of repression whilst denying their involvement in the subjugation of the underprivileged. For the young socialists, the “lie” that “there is no class war”, the “invisibility” of this class war, is more problematic than the fact of classism itself (BC 52):

That’s why the Establishment keeps such an iron grip on what’s taught in schools, specially in history. Once the workers wise up, the revolution will kick off. And, as Gil Scott-Heron tells us, it will not be televised. (BC 52)383 Reprising the arguments raised in number9dream and Black Swan Green, Ian refers to the media as an instrument of (and for) capitalism. In many respects these minor characters, Heidi and Ian, function as mouthpieces for Mitchell’s critique of social conditions under capitalism. They are not, however, without their contradictions and failings. In the first instance, the two are adamant that the socialist revolution is imminent. Heidi declares that Karl Marx has “proved how capitalism eats itself. When it

383 Gil-Scott Heron was an American jazz artist and spoken-word poet who wrote “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”. can’t feed the millions it spits out, no amount of lies or brutality will save it” (BC 54). This is a bittersweet moment of irony, however, as the development of capitalism leads to the eventual destruction of the people and the planet that it exploits. At least that is how such development is imagined in the multiverse of Mitchell’s novels. In the second instance, Heidi’s own privileged, wealthy lifestyle undermines her egalitarian stance. Holly’s reflection upon her newfound friends, their ideals and their contrary living arrangements, illustrates the very inequity against which the couple is railing:

I smear a bit of Woods of Windsor moisturiser on my suntanned skin, thinking how easily Heidi might have been born in a grotty Gravesend pub, and me the one who’s clever and confident and studying politics in London, and who has French shampoo, and a kind, funny, caring and loyal boyfriend who also cooks a five-star English breakfast. Being born’s a hell of a lottery. (BC 53) The “lottery” of birth, the injustice of disparate circumstances, is a prevailing concern throughout the novel. The second chapter, “Myrrh is Mine, its Bitter Perfume”, satirises privileged (yet avaricious and status-hungry) Cambridge undergraduates, and the third chapter, entitled “The Wedding Bash”, constitutes a lament for the plight of Iraqi civilians after the American invasion in 2003. In the fourth chapter, the wealthy British author Crispin Hershey visits Colombia where he observes the extreme disparity between classes as he walks through a street, surveying the local people:

Global capitalism does not appear to have been kind to the owners of these impassive faces. I wonder what these working-class Colombians make of us? Where do they sleep, what do they eat, of what do they dream? Each of the American-built limousines surely costs more than a lifetime’s earnings for these street vendors. (BC 299) Mitchell’s familiar formula of dispersing his narratives across time produces a planetary glimpse of misfortune in birth, affirming Heidi’s and Ian’s claims that class struggles have been inescapable throughout human history. Imaculée Constantin, the Anchorite who grooms and attempts to abduct Holly in “A Hot Spell”, asserts that “Power’s comings and goings, from host to host, via war, marriage, ballot box, diktat and accident of birth, are the plot of history” (BC 96). A decidedly villainous character, Constantin nevertheless posits the neutrality of power: “The empowered may serve justice, remodel the Earth, transform lush nations into smoking battlefields and bring down skyscrapers, but power itself is amoral” (BC 96). Her assessment of power affirms the assertion of Adam Ewing, expressed at the end of Cloud Atlas, that the world can be changed – that power can be wielded for good. The inference of Ewing’s belief and Constantin’s concession is that the mistakes of history need not be repeated in the future, and that individuals and communities are moral agents responsible for the future of the earth and humanity.

The struggle between the Anchorites and the Horologists suggests Mitchell’s attempt to make the “invisible” class war visible. The unseen beings who move from one body to another “bone clock” can possess and control the minds and memories of their hosts. There are clear resonances with psychoanalysis and the uncanny. Holly reflects upon her dealings with Miss Constantin (in a tale she entitles “Weird Shit”), and is at least partially convinced that she has been experiencing hallucinations, temporary schizophrenia, or suffering from daymares. It is only when Miss Constantin evolves from benign visitor to murderous avenger (by causing the serious injury of a girl who had bullied Holly), that Holly recognises her as an alien presence. Miss Constantin, as both a projection in Holly’s mind and a separate entity, exemplifies Lyndenberg’s concept of the uncanny as something familiar yet “divided within by something potentially alien and threatening”.384 Holly’s mother takes her to see Dr Yu Leon Marinus, which is the first appearance of Marinus in the novel. Marinus closes her third eye, thereby preventing the Anchorites from decanting her soul. As time passes, Holly represses the memories of Miss Constantin, believing her to have been an “imaginary friend”. Holly’s persistent incredulity about her encounters with the uncanny Anchorites is driven by her dedication to the scientific reality principle. During a gruesome attack by the Anchorite Joseph Rhimes, in which he murders Heidi and Ian, Holly doubts the validity of what she is seeing unfolding around her: “What nutso part of my mind dreams up shit as weird as that, f’Chrissakes?” (BC 61). Her memories of the scene are erased by Esther Little, a gravely injured Horologist who seeks Asylum in the deep recesses of Holly’s mind.

Hugo Lamb, the narrator of the second chapter, is conscious of the class divide between himself (a “scholarship boy”) and his wealthy classmates. Hugo previously appeared in Black Swan Green as the cousin of the protagonist. This early appearance established his ruthless ambition and his power to manipulate people. In The Bone Clocks, he devises numerous scams in order to make money, including stealing the stamp

384 Robin Lyndenberg, “Freud’s Uncanny Narratives,” 1073. collection of an Alzheimer’s patient whose protégé he had once been, and fixing a polka game in order to take advantage of his wealthy friend Johnny Penhaligon (who is a descendant of Captain Penhaligon from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet). Hugo’s motivation for his criminal endeavours derives from his cynicism about capitalism – a system that, in his consideration, reduces workers to a sub-human state. His description of a train and its passengers illustrates this perspective:

Commuters sway like sides of beef and slump like corpses: red- eyed office slaves plugged into Discmans; their podgier selves in their forties buried in the Evening Standard; and nearly retired versions gazing over west London wondering where their lives went. I am the System you have to beat, clacks the carriage. I am the System you have to beat. But what does ‘beating the system’ mean? Becoming rich enough to buy one’s manumission from the daily humiliation of employment? (BC 129) Hugo is one of many characters in Mitchell’s fiction who conceive of office workers as slaves – Neal Brose and Eiji ruminate on “drones” and people being “plugged into” technology. After a one-night stand in a hippie commune, however, Hugo is struck with “the insight that ‘outside the system’ means poverty” (BC 130). He focuses his efforts, therefore, on exploiting the system by creating a false identity – Marcus Anyder.385 He creates Anyder “not only as a fake account-holder to own and obscure [his] ill-gotten gains, but to be a better, sharper, truer version of Hugo Lamb” (BC 163). Hugo’s observations on the injustices of capitalism do not reflect a moral position, but rather his sociopathic self-interest. He is not concerned with rectifying the system that renders birth a “lottery”; he is motivated purely by a desire to ascend the hierarchy of capitalism by any means necessary.

Underpinning Hugo’s lust for money is his immanent fear of death. “Life is a terminal illness”, he quips, and this morbid attitude informs his decision (at the end of the chapter) to become an Anchorite (BC 164). The title of the chapter, “Myrrh is Mine, its Bitter Perfume”, deriving from the Christmas carol “We Three Kings of Orient Are”, emphasises Hugo’s eschatological preoccupation. The carol heralds the birth of Jesus Christ, as well as prophesying his eventual death:

385 The alias “Anyder” is a reference to the river that runs through the island of Utopia in Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Dominic Baker-Smith (London: Penguin Group, 2011). The allusion prompts the reader to consider the virtues and pitfalls of programs for utopia. The enforced communalism of Utopia in More’s monograph undermine the positive outcomes of the regime. Hugo Lamb’s personal utopia (immortality and wealth) requires the sacrifice of human relationships and a moral compromise (he must kill others to stay alive). At the end of the novel it is apparent that immortality was not worth the high price Hugo paid. Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume. Breathes a life of gathering gloom Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying, Seal’d in the stone-cold tomb.386 The carol is invoked when Hugo first encounters Imaculée Constantin in a chapel at Cambridge. She directs his gaze to a painting above the altar – Rubens’ The Adoration of the Magi. In her appraisal of the painting she observes a conflation of the birth and death of Jesus:

Thirteen subjects, if you count them, like the Last Supper. Shepherds, the Magi, the relatives. Study their faces, one by one. Who believes this newborn manikin can one day conquer death? Who wants proof? Who suspects the Messiah is a false prophet? Who knows that he is in a painting, being watched? Who is watching you back? (BC 97) Constantin’s line of questioning destabilises the status of the artwork as that of mere object. The notion that the painted figures are self-aware, and that the critic (in this case, Hugo) is the object of the painting’s gaze is a challenge to Hugo’s rational principles. Constantin plants this first seed of doubt in her quest to turn him into an Anchorite. She eventually succeeds in converting Hugo by appealing to his fear of death.

The invisibility and inevitability of decay is a persistent fear that permeates Hugo’s narration. He articulates this fear after he visits a former brigadier who lives in “Riverside Villas”, a retirement village. The brigadier is the vulnerable dementia patient from whom Hugo steals. Hugo reads aloud to the brigadier from Joseph Conrad’s Youth, and relates to the reader his thoughts on society’s inability to cope with death. Hugo’s reverie recalls the critique of ageism in “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish” in Cloud Atlas. He reflects that:

[. . .] our culture’s coping strategy towards death is to bury it under consumerism and samsara; that the Riverside Villas of the world are screens that enable this self-deception, and that the elderly are guilty: guilty of proving to us that our wilful myopia about death is exactly that. (BC 116) The exclusion of the elderly from mainstream society bespeaks an attempt to repress knowledge of our own mortality. Hugo himself is guilty of burying his fear of death with consumerism – hence his unscrupulous efforts to amass wealth and avoid the

386 “We Three Kings,” traditional, recorded 2007, on Christmas Trombones, Alexander Street Press, compact disc. pitfalls of “dronehood”. A self-proclaimed sociopath, Hugo is not moved to pity by the marginalisation of the elderly. Rather, he dispassionately identifies with the aged brigadier and concludes that “whatever I do with my life, however much power, wealth, experience, knowledge or beauty I’ll accrue, I, too, will end up like this vulnerable old man” (BC 120). Hugo’s revelation brings to consciousness the repressed knowledge of his own mortality.

Hugo falls in love with Holly Sykes, despite his professed abhorrence for, and disbelief in, love. During their brief courtship, he experiences a moment of prescience and senses his “impending metamorphosis” (BC 172). This metamorphosis requires him to choose between Holly and potentially immortal life as an Anchorite. In the fifth chapter of the novel, Hugo rationalises his decision to become an Anchorite:

They cured me of a terrible wasting disease called mortality. There’s a lot of it about. The young hold out for a time, but eventually even the hardiest patient gets reduced to a desiccated embryo, a Strudlebug . . . a veined, scrawny dribbling . . . bone clock, whose face betrays how very, very little time they have left. (BC 501) Prior to the offer of induction by the Anchorites Elijah D’Arnoq and Baptiste Pfenninger, he conceives of love as an antidote to death. In metafictional (and eschatological) terms, he argues that “Love is a blurring of pronouns. Love is subject and object. The difference between its presence and its absence is the difference between life and death” (BC 180). When he is offered the chance to become an Anchorite, he acknowledges that “This is a real, live Faustian pact I’m being offered” (BC 187). Imitating his literary antecedent, Dr Faustus, Hugo accepts the Anchorites’ offer. He contemplates a future with Holly and, consistent with his morbid pessimism, persuades himself that their lust would not have endured. He concludes, despite his early romanticism, that “[. . .] it’s the feeling of love that we love: not the person” (BC 187).

The concept of an “invisible war” is given real-world context in the third chapter of the novel, entitled “The Wedding Bash”. The chapter is narrated by Ed Brubeck who is a war reporter working for Spyglass magazine (the same publication for which Luisa Rey worked in Cloud Atlas). It is apparent that the friendship between Holly and Ed that began in “A Hot Spell” has developed into a romance, resulting in the conception and birth of their daughter, Aoife Brubeck. “The Wedding Bash” is set in 2004, the title referring to the wedding of Holly’s sister Sharon. Ed’s narrative of the wedding weekend is interspersed with flashbacks to his recent tour of Iraq. The contrast between the peaceful English setting and the volatile Iraqi climate is jarring, and Ed struggles to reconcile the disparate living conditions. He does not condemn those fortunate enough to be born in stable environs, yet he observes that amongst the wedding guests there is a pervasive apathy about the plight of the Iraqis. He concludes that “The world’s default mode is basic indifference. It’d like to care, but it’s just got too much on at the moment” (BC 200). His motivation for being a journalist is to combat what he perceives to be the invisibility of atrocity: as “if an atrocity isn’t written about, it stops existing when the last witnesses die” (BC 200). In this chapter, Mitchell appears to be engaging with Jean Baudrillard’s assertion that “The Gulf War did not take place”. Baudrillard’s argument that the Gulf War is a hyperreal phenomenon (as has been discussed earlier in the thesis) underscores his critique of contemporary society as disconnected from reality. During the wedding reception, when he is asked why the intervention in Iraq has gone “horribly off script”, Ed argues that the American government’s conception of Iraq was misplaced, even hyperreal: “Because the script was written referring not to Iraq as it was, but to a fantasy Iraq as Rumsfeld, Rice and Bush et al wanted it to be, or dreamt it to be, or were promised by their pet Iraqis-in-exile it would be” (BC 239). The supposed justification for the war (the prospect of a peaceful Iraq liberated from its violent dictator) is a pure simulacrum – it bears no relation to reality whatsoever. Several military operations are conducted from afar through virtual weapons systems. For example, Ed observes an American drone surveying a medical clinic for Iraqi civilians. He imagines that the drone pilot is an American called Ryan who

[…] could open fire on the clinic, kill everyone in and near it, and never smell the cooked meat. To Ryan, we’d be pixelated thermal images on a screen, writhing about a bit, turning from yellow to red to blue. (BC 233) Ryan is insulated from the reality of his actions because he is engaging merely with images on a screen that resemble a video game. Ed identifies a determination amongst the American soldiers whom he encounters to preserve a hyperreal barrier between them and the realities of the conflict zone. The American base in Iraq, known as “The Green Zone”, is nicknamed the “Emerald City” in an allusion to The Wizard of Oz. The base is a hyperreal space; it is a “ten-kilometre-square fortress maintained by the US Army and its contractors to keep out the reality of post-invasion Iraq and preserve the illusion of a kind of Tampa, Florida, in the Middle East” (BC 216). Again evoking Baudrillard, Ed describes the view from his hotel as follows: “Through the window I looked across the oil-black Tigris at the Green Zone, lit up like Disneyland in Dystopia” (BC 259). Baudrillard identifies Disneyland as a prime example of a “third-order simulation”, in which the sign “conceals an absence”:387

Disneyland exists in order to hide that is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real […].388 The association forged between the Green Zone (a place of stability and ready access to electricity and food) and Disneyland recasts the chaos of post-invasion Iraq as the normal state of affairs (the “real”). During the wedding reception, Ed expresses fatigue with the Western perception that the Middle East is perennially tumultuous. The Green Zone/Disneyland effectively perpetuates the myth that American culture (even when it is transported to the Middle East) is synonymous with prosperity and stability, and that chaos is the by-product of Islamic culture. Ed hints at the unreality of post-invasion Iraq by identifying it as “Dystopia”. Ed’s narrative is designed to debunk the misconceptions about Iraq and the Iraqis. Alternatively, the image of “Disneyland in Dystopia” underscores the contradiction between the utopic vision for Iraq (modelled after the simulacra of a “perfect America”) and the disastrous reality that has been created by the intervention. Augmenting his condemnation, Ed refers to the Tigris as “oil-black”, suggestively raising the unofficial motivation for the United States’ intervention in Iraq.

Although Ed accepts a hyperreal conceptualisation of the war, he is not exasperated or disaffected with his role in conveying narratives of the war. He reasons that:

If a mass shooting, a bomb, a whatever, is written about, then at least it’s made a tiny dent in the world’s memory. Someone, somewhere, some time, has a chance of learning what happened. And, just maybe, acting on it. Or not. But at least it’s there. (BC 200)

387 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 6. 388 Ibid., 12. The Gulf War may not have resembled previous wars in purpose and in operation, but the effects of the war are very real to the Iraqi and Kuwaiti people.389 Ed is not disputing the idea that the outside world can only engage with the war as a hyperreal event. The nature of the narrative that is told by the media, however, is nevertheless significant. In my discussion of Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green I touched upon the recurring idea in Mitchell’s fiction of a “truer Truth”, and this is what Ed strives for in his reporting. The acceptance that war reportage is a form of simulacra does not prevent Ed from attempting to represent the war as authentically as possible. Truth, in an absolute form (as metanarrative), may not be graspable, but that does not invalidate its pursuit.

Citing Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mitchell has declared that he does not believe that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”.390 The “Wedding Bash” narrative, in accordance with other scenes in Mitchell’s fiction, nevertheless proclaims the influence of the written word. In what might be read as an allusion to Cloud Atlas, Holly’s mother proposes that Ed is “a sort of archivist for the future” (BC 200). The (literal) archivist in Cloud Atlas is the character to whom Sonmi-451 relates her life story and her Declarations. He is an employee of Unanimity, the government that exploits and eventually executes Sonmi as a means of deterring its citizens from future rebellions. The recording that the archivist makes of Sonmi’s testimony eventually transcends the context of its production and influences a movement for the emancipation of clones and the destitute. The written word may not “assassinate” and the laptop may not “[Kill] Neocapitalism” as two author characters in The Bone Clocks insist, but writing does preserve memories and create connections between disparate groups of people (BC 308, 307). Furthermore, and as has been illustrated in my analysis of Black Swan Green and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, narrative expression is crucial to self- actualisation.

There are several spatial binaries evoked in “The Wedding Bash”; America/Iraq, Iraq/Brighton, Reality/Fantasy, and Civilisation/Conflict-zone. The chapter situates the narrator at a crossroads. Ed is accused of being a “war-zone junkie”, and Holly gives him an ultimatum – to leave his dangerous job as a foreign correspondent or to end their

389 Mitchell also explored the impact of this war on soldiers in his short story “Character Development”, in which an army private faces the dilemma of reporting his mates for accidentally shooting an Iraqi doctor. 390 David Mitchell, interview by Kelly Frame, 25 May 2015, Sydney. Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1972), 59. relationship. The collateral damage of his addiction to risk is intimacy with his partner and his daughter. The disappearance of Aoife from his hotel room provides him with the opportunity to understand fully the consequences of his decision to continue to live and work away from his family. Ed’s dilemma is represented spatially as he searches for Aoife in the hotel:

I hurtle along a service passage, skidding past a sign marked ‘LEVEL ZERO ACCESS’, and what’s this prodding certainty that I’m in a labyrinth not only of turnings and doors but decisions and priorities, that I’ve been in it not just a minute or two but ages, years, and that I took some bad turns many years ago that I can’t get back to [. . .]. (BC 264) At the end of the chapter, he concedes that “I’m an addict, Holly. Life is flat and stale when I’m not working. . . .I’m a war-zone junkie. And I don’t know what to do about it” (BC 277). Ed is given a second chance by Holly, but also by the author who is symbolised in the figure of the moon-grey cat. After venturing out into Baghdad, Ed returns to his hotel where the cat beckons him:

I heard a miaow nearby and looked down to see a moon-grey cat melting out of the shadows. I bent down to say hello, which was the one and only reason why I wasn’t scalped like a boiled egg when the explosion outside blew in the glass windows on the western face of the Safir Hotel [. . .] (BC 259) Ed is cynical of the supernatural despite this moment of serendipity. This cynicism is tested when Aoife disappears and Holly succumbs to a seizure. In this trance, she articulates the numbers ten and fifteen. Dwight Silverwind, a fraudulent magician (who first appears on the Bat Segundo Show in Ghostwritten), believes in the Script and insists that the numbers are a sign. At the behest of Silverwind Ed finds the room numbered 1015 and discovers Aoife, who had been accidentally locked in the room after mistakenly entering it. He confesses that “My agnosticism’s badly shaken” after Holly’s trance and Silverwind’s convictions appear to be authentic (BC 275).

The novel progresses to the year 2015 in the chapter narrated by Crispin Hershey. Many parallels can be identified between Hershey and Mitchell’s other literary characters such as Marco, Goatwriter, and Timothy Cavendish. Hershey is a fictional parody of Mitchell himself as well as of a number of other English writers, possibly including Martin Amis.391 Hershey’s narrative is permeated with self-referential allusions to the author, to literature in general, and to the artifice of fiction. Hershey is first mentioned in the second chapter of The Bone Clocks when Richard Cheeseman – a Cambridge undergraduate and friend of Hugo Lamb – favourably reviews Hershey’s novel, Desiccated Embryos. The fourth chapter opens with Hershey reeling from a scathing review, also by Cheeseman, of his most recent novel, Echo Must Die. Cheeseman makes two observations about Echo Must Die which are evidently metafictional references to The Bone Clocks itself. First, he asks the rhetorical question: “what surer sign is there that the creative aquifers are dry than a writer creating a writer-character?” (BC 281-2). Second, Cheeseman concludes that “the fantasy sub-plot clashes so violently with the book’s State of the World pretensions, I cannot bear to look” (BC 281).

Before considering the “State of the World” concerns expressed by Hershey/Mitchell, I want to explore the significance of metafiction in this chapter of The Bone Clocks. In the first instance, the emphasis on metafiction in “Crispin Hershey’s Lonely Planet” casts new light on the fantasy plotline through which the novel coheres. The Horologists refer to “the Script” which, while never fully explained to the reader, is the story of fate that is revealed to the psychically gifted. Esther Little and Xi Lo, the oldest of the Horologists, have the most comprehensive knowledge of the Script and therefore the future. As prophecy the Script is not inexorable; it is rather a suggestion of what the future might look like if certain actions are taken. The main protagonists in The Bone Clocks – Holly, Hugo, Crispin, and Marinus – are all included in the Script. This is not Mitchell’s first foray into the dynamics of fate and chance, as I have demonstrated in the chapter on Ghostwritten. The Bone Clocks, however, is more overt than Mitchell’s earlier novels in identifying the role of the author as the producer of fate; hence the symbolic labelling of fate itself as “the Script”. In the conclusion to “Crispin Hershey’s Lonely Planet”, Crispin is accused by Soleil Moore (a woman who writes poetry about the Anchorites) of altering the Script. She declares to Crispin that “You wrote yourself into the Script. You describe it in ‘The Voorman Problem’. What you write, in that story, that’s what the Anchorites do. You can’t deny it. You can’t” (BC 381). Hershey’s

391 Claire Armitstead,“David Mitchell or Martin Amis: Who is the Bitter Writer?”, The Guardian, September 29, 2014, accessed November 5, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/sep/29/david-mitchell-or-martin-amis-who-is-the- bitter-writer-in-the-bone-clocks. short story “The Voorman Problem” appeared as the film PanOpticon which is described by Eiji in number9dream.392 As discussed in the chapter on number9dream, Voorman is an inmate in a mental asylum who convinces the other patients that he is God. His ability to control minds is demonstrated when he claims that he has removed Belgium from the map and from collective memory. When Voorman is examined by a psychologist, he seizes the opportunity to switch bodies with his visitor. He escapes the prison in this disguise, and the psychologist is trapped in the body of a madman. The Anchorites in The Bone Clocks do possess the power to redact memories and control minds, however, they are tethered to their bodies. Crispin is sceptical about the existence of the supernatural for most of the “Lonely Planet” chapter and, as he wrote “The Voorman Problem” when he was a younger man, it stands to reason that he was not aware of the resonances between his tale and the reality of the Anchorites. These resonances, rather than being coincidence, are evidence that the postmodern text creates meaning outside of the intention of the author, and that the authority of the author is itself limited. The question of whether Crispin “wrote himself into the Script”, or whether the Script used him as a mouthpiece as it did Holly, is important. Both characters are adamant that they did not knowingly involve themselves in the Script; rather, they are unwilling victims of chance and serendipity much as are the characters of Ghostwritten. Their unknowingness is demonstrative of the invisible or uncanny forces the novel seeks to uncover.

Hershey’s novel Echo Must Die, condescendingly described by the (fictional) Australian intellectual Aphra Booth as “a classic male mid-life crisis novel”, reflects Hershey’s own life and troubled state of mind (BC 283). The title itself invokes the myth of Echo and Narcissus in which Echo is cursed by Hera and is able only to repeat the words of others, never to initiate dialogue or produce her own words. Crispin expresses a hatred of cliché – an indicator of his preoccupation with the idea of originality in fiction. Alternatively, the reference to Echo in conjunction with the gerundive “must die” could extend to his (and the novel’s – perhaps even Mitchell’s) disenchantment with literary critics. At work the critic is Echo, confined by the original work of another, interpreting the original with alternate inflection, but never producing

392 In one of Eiji’s daydreams he visits a cinema and watches the movie. It is not known (to the reader and seemingly to Eiji) that the film is an adaptation of a ‘real’ story by Crispin Hershey. This is an example of Mitchell’s various interconnections between his novels and why his books should each be considered within the context of his entire oeuvre. innovation. This reading is reinforced by the narrative of revenge which Hershey enacts against Richard Cheeseman after the appearance of his contemptuous review. Hershey plants cocaine in the lining of Cheeseman’s luggage while they are both guests at a writers’ festival in Colombia. Hershey then (anonymously) informs customs officers at Heathrow Airport that Cheeseman is smuggling drugs, hoping that he will be caught and shamed once he returns to England. The plan produces unforeseen consequences, however, and the critic is arrested in Colombia and then imprisoned for years without any assurance of emancipation. Hershey regrets his act of vengeance, and his theory of art evolves alongside his remorse and maturation. At one point he presents a lecture in Iceland in which he posits the following theory:

A poet uses a pen to write, but, of course, the poet doesn’t make the pen. He or she buys, borrows, inherits, steals or otherwise acquires the pen from elsewhere. Similarly, a poet inhabits a poetic tradition to write within, but no poet can singlehandedly create that tradition. Even if a poet sets out to invent a new poetics, he or she can only react against what’s already there. (BC 361) Hershey’s poetics now embraces the echo - the reaction “against what’s already there”. In a way, this constitutes a rationale for Mitchell’s own overt intertextuality. This conception of art as “reaction” is consistent with the postmodern resistance towards the idea of originality in art. The postmodern features of Hershey’s theory are further developed as he places emphasis upon the importance of space and cognitive mapping:

Writers don’t write in a void. We work in a physical space, a room, […], but also we write within an imaginative space. Amid boxes, crates, shelves and cabinets full of […] junk, treasure, both cultural – nursery rhymes, mythologies, histories, what Tolkien called “the compost heap” – and also personal stuff: childhood TV, home- grown cosmologies, stories we hear first from our parents, or later from our children, and, crucially, maps. Mental maps. Maps with edges. And for Auden, for so many of us, it’s the edges of the maps that fascinate . . . (BC 363) This account of imaginative space is notably similar to Jameson’s account of cognitive mapping in the era of postmodernism. The experience of the writer has been transformed by the processes of global capital and technological evolution. Hershey observes that the writer in the postmodern era is perpetually grappling with echo, as “For most digital-age writers, writing is rewriting” (BC 358). This does not, however, lead to advances in fiction. As Hershey ponders: “On the other hand, if digital technology is so superior a midwife of the novel, where are this century’s masterpieces?” (BC 358). Digital tools are one indicator of the writer’s condition under postmodernism. Another meaningful condition is that of space, alluded to in Hershey’s account of mental maps. Hershey is the planetary subject – the very title of the chapter, “Crispin Hershey’s Lonely Planet”, defines him as a deterritorialized wanderer. The title is ambiguous, evoking the romance of youth and spiritual affirmation implicit in the activity of backpacking, as well as a sense of isolation from community. A conversation with the (fictional) Australian children’s author (named Kenny Bloke with heavy- handed humour by Mitchell) elicits the following reflection from Hershey: “‘Rootlessness,’ I opine, ‘is the twenty-first-century norm’” (BC 297). Concurring, Kenny identifies indifference to the environment as a sinister effect of rootlessness, remarking to Hershey that “that’s why we’re in the shit we’re in, mate. If you belong nowhere, why give a tinker’s toss about anywhere?” (BC 297).

Hershey’s rootlessness, his detachment from the environment, is made apparent when he ventures into wild spaces, which he characterises as uncanny. These scenes also produce useful contexts in which Mitchell/Hershey can contemplate the “State of the World”. During his visit to Perth for the Writers’ Festival, Crispin cycles to Rottnest Island, yet “it keeps reappearing at odd angles and in wrong sizes, but refuses to let [him] arrive” (BC 317). Crispin compares the apparent inaccessibility of the Island to a “hill in Through the Looking-Glass that does the same until Alice stops trying to arrive there” (BC 317). Rottnest Island resists empirical measurement. It is in many ways like Hanging Rock – haunted, inspiring the “feeling of being watched”, a feeling that “we aren’t the only ones here. There are lots. Near” (BC 322). The Island is steeped in the trauma of nineteenth century Noongar, a trauma which is communicated through Holly, Crispin having unexpectedly encountered Holly and the now adolescent Aoife. Without warning, Holly falls into a seizure and channels the voices of Indigenous spirits:

Whitefella made Wadjemup a prison for Noongar. F’burning bush, like we always done, Whitefella ship us to Wadjemup. Chains. Cells. Coldbox. Hotbox. Years. Whips. Work. Worst thing is this: our souls can’t cross the sea. So when the prison boat takes us from Fremantle, our soul’s torn from our body. (BC 323) The possession of Holly Sykes by the spirit of nineteenth century Noongar prisoners brings together two different temporal contexts with an uncanny effect. Rottnest is a palimpsest of these contexts, the familiar façade concealing a suppressed presence. The Island also establishes the correlation between the uncanny Australian space and its Indigenous people who are introduced as spectres living in the liminal space between life and death. This state of spectrality, however, has been forced upon them by the “whitefella”. This scene could be read as an ironically self-reflexive comment on colonial representations of the Indigenous. That is to say, the reduction of the Indigenous to a spectre, to the uncanny Other, is a violent act of repression. Furthermore, the implication is that the Noongar’s story can only be heard if it is both uttered and heard by English tourists. Mitchell nevertheless persists with the trope of the Indigenous spectre, if in a subversive way. The othering of the Indigenous can serve a political point. Gelder and Jacobs note that

[…] much contemporary New Age environmentalism and Jungian spiritualism turns to Aboriginal religion as a means of making modernity reconcilable with itself. Here, Aboriginal sacredness retains its other-worldly, residual features, but it is also activated as something emergent, as integral to what we might (or should) ‘become’.393 Australia is not the only nation that is represented as uncanny in The Bone Clocks. When Hershey travels through Iceland some years later, he describes the remote areas as eerie and foreboding. He admits that his scepticism towards the supernatural is challenged by the landscape. A cairn of stones on the road prompts him to recall the advice of Aoife’s fiancé Orvar:

Feel free to add a stone and make a wish, Orvar told me, but never remove one, or a spirit could slip out to curse you and your bloodline. The threat isn’t as quaint up here as it sounded down in Reykjavik. (BC 343) He resorts to extra-planetary imagery to capture the other-worldliness of a place, and does so in describing Iceland’s wilderness: “The few glaciers I’ve seen previously were grubby toes unworthy of the name – Langjökull is vast . . . The visible skull of an ice- planet smooshed onto Earth” (BC 343). Nevertheless, Crispin identifies within the Icelandic countryside the dynamic between familiar and unfamiliar that comprises the uncanny: “The river’s vowels and the trees’ consonants speak a not-quite-foreign language” (BC 350). The personification of the river and trees undermines the scientific reality principle, the environment not merely being an object or resource if it can produce the impression of sentience through language. Crispin is humbled by the grandeur and uncanny wisdom that he senses in the wilds of Australia and Iceland. The

393 Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs, Uncanny Australia, (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1998), 1. residual spirituality inhabiting these spaces creates a platform for environmentalism, and Mitchell returns to this uncanny/planetary dynamic later in the novel.

The “invisible war” between the Anchorites and the Horologists is brought to the foreground in the fifth section of the novel, entitled “An Horologist’s Labyrinth”. The section is set in 2025 and is narrated by Marinus, who has assumed the body and identity of Dr Iris Fenby, an African-American psychiatrist. Marinus receives a message from Esther Little, directing her to begin the “Second Mission” – an assault upon the Chapel of the Dusk, the headquarters of the Anchorites and the site of their “psychodecanter” (an icon that draws out the souls of the psychically gifted so that it can devour them). Up to this point, The Bone Clocks balances psychological realism with sporadic instances of fantasy. “An Horologist’s Labyrinth” fully engages with the fantasy genre, from the invented terminology (such as “psychodecanter” and “psychosoteric”) to the fantastic space of the Chapel of the Dusk, which exists on a desert over which the souls of the dead travel until they are extinguished within the mysterious dark cloud of the “dusk”. This section of the novel has been targeted by critics as lacking finesse, and the chapter’s preoccupation with the technicalities of the Horologists’ existence risks derailing the political poignancy and character development sustained in the novel up to this point.394 Mitchell’s lexicon for the fantastic elements of The Bone Clocks does border upon outlandish. The title of the Anchorites’ headquarters is, in full, “The Chapel of the Dusk of the Blind Cathar of the Thomasite Monastery of Sidelhorn Pass” (BC 189). It could be speculated that Mitchell is delivering a pastiche of the fantasy genre, which is typically characterised by overdrawn terminology. There are several instances in which the text draws attention to its own clichés. Holly kills Miss Constantin with a rolling pin she had purloined from the Horologists’ kitchen as a weapon. She concedes to Marinus that “So – yeah, I know, hysterical woman, rolling pin, big fat cliché, Crispin would’ve rolled his eyes and said, ‘Oh, come on!’ but I wanted . . . y’know . . . something” (BC 516). Similarly, the Horologist Oshima “suckerkinetics”, that is to say, telepathically throws the Anchorite Elijah D’Arnoq down the surface of a long table. Oshima acknowledges that this is a stereotypical

394 See for example, Derek Thompson, “The Bone Clocks: David Mitchell’s Almost-Perfect Masterpiece,” The Atlantic, September 2, 2014, accessed October 1, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/09/review-david-mitchells-bone-clocks-the- cloud-atlas-authors-meta-masterpiece/379445/. James Wood, “Soul Cycle: David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks,” The New Yorker, September 8, 2014, accessed October 4, 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/08/soul-cycle. action film trope, admitting that “It’s an obvious play: long, smooth table; annoying person. Who could resist?” (BC 499). The chapter cannot be ultimately categorised as pastiche, however, due to the sobering presence of Marinus as the narrator. Marinus is a complex character, whose rich history is unfolded in flashbacks throughout the chapter in The Bone Clocks. Despite her immense age and accrued wisdom, Iris Fenby Marinus is tormented with doubts. The chapter opens with an existential reverie:

I’m too weighed down to bestir myself. Are we mutants? Have we evolved this way? Or are we designed? Designed by whom? Why did the designer go to such elaborate lengths only to vacate the stage and leave us wondering why we exist? For entertainment? For perversity? For a joke? To judge us? ‘To what end?’ I ask my car, the night, Canada. (BC 387) Marinus’ existential crisis does not differ significantly from that of mere mortals. Rather, she and the other Horologists offer a paradigm through which Mitchell can explore the boundaries of human identity.

The “Returnees” – Horologists such as Marinus who are reincarnated – are often reborn in the body of the opposite gender “just to screw your head up properly” (BC 431). Marinus’ experience of life as a woman reinforces the idea that gender is performative. She recounts the stark contrast between life as genteel man and life as peasant girl: “It was a long fall indeed from Lucas Marinus’s life as a surgeon-scholar to Klara’s dog- eat-dog squalor, and it was going to be a long, fitful, fretful climb back up the social ladder, especially in a female body in the early nineteenth century” (BC 449). As Klara, Marinus affects a modest, supplicatory style of interaction in order to render her intelligence unthreatening to the men (and high class women) around her. The Sojourners, by contrast, “often have a gender they’re most at home in” (BC 488). The Returnees are gender fluid, yet the Sojourner’s expression of preference for a gender (Esther Little, for example, prefers a female body) would suggest that the novel is affirming the “trouble”, to use Judith Butler’s term, of delimiting gender.395 Racial identity is less malleable in the novel, as many characters – Returnees and Sojourners – continue to identify with their native culture, language and land. Unalaq is a Horologist born as an Inuit, and Marinus remarks that her experience in Northern Alaska had “dyed

395 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, (New York: Routledge, 1999). her soul indelibly with the far north” (BC 398). The soul of Esther Little is similarly permeated with her country of origin.

Esther Little, known to the Noongar tribe as Moombaki, encapsulates the novel’s vision of Australia as an uncanny space. The current body of Esther Little is of mixed heritage – her father was white and her mother was indigenous. She is an example of the “racial uncanny” – through colonial eyes she is both familiar and unfamiliar. When Marinus first meets Esther, he observes her clothing. She wears “a shapeless cassock of the type handed out by missionaries faced with large quantities of native skin to cover up” (BC 411). Her indigeneity is repressed by the garb of the colonists – the familiar concealing the unfamiliar. Esther’s “true name” reveals her holistic connection with the land and the Noongar:

Although her true name lay beyond my knowledge of the Noongar language, as the minutes passed I understood that her name was also a history of her people, a sort of Bayeux Tapestry that bound myth with loves, births, deaths; hunts, battles, journeys; droughts, fires, storms; and the names of every host within whose body Moombaki had sojourned. With the word Esther her name ended (BC 416). Esther therefore incarnates the history of the Noongar: she is the “collective memory” of her people, a people who do not draw the Cartesian distinction between space and the soul (BC 414). The land is a part of her, and even Holly Sykes, who is completely ignorant of Esther’s national identity when she first encounters her, observes that her voice “sounds from somewhere hot” (BC 22). She is forever in dialogue with the land, explaining to Marinus that “the bush talks, dunnit? We listen” (BC 413). Esther is demonstrably inseparable from the culture that originally fostered her.

The depiction of Esther as an uncanny being borders upon a kind of orientalism that requires attention. In conversation with myself, David Mitchell defended his choice of the Noongar tribe, explaining that he had been inspired the Indigenous writer Kim Scott. He remarked that:

I realised I needed a really ancient, ancient culture and there’s only one left, then I thought back to that conversation [with Kim Scott], read That Deadman Dance, looking for information, and there was a website you can click into that gives some vocabulary, tried to get my ear around cadences and pidgin English, and then tried to think of a way to write it so that my still huge ignorance would not kill that section. So it’s all being seen through English eyes, all through Marinus’ eyes, who was ignorant like I was. So that gives you a lot of latitude, even [if you’re] sympathetic for proto-anthropologists, Marinus would still be making loads of mistakes and he would know it. So that obviously covered my mistakes. Because if I tried to write Deadman Dance it better be damn perfect or I would deserve everything I get.396 Mitchell is professedly concerned with historical accuracy, but he also evinces a concern with cultural sensitivity and authenticity, which is very interesting given that he has written stories from the perspective of Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Mongolian, Dutch and Polynesian characters, to a name a few. Why, then, the hesitation to adopt a Noongar voice? Consciously or subconsciously, the greater concern with authenticity in this case derives from the conceptualisation of the Indigenous as a kind of “Other”. The scene on Rottnest Island goes to the heart of the issue. The agency of the Noongar, their ability to express and represent themselves, is repressed. Their stories are appropriated by colonial powers who dehumanise them and turn them into spectres. As Marie-Luise Kohkle and Celia Wallhead have argued in an analysis of Cloud Atlas, “control over the Other and his/her (traumatic) story [is] a prevalent theme in Mitchell’s novel”.397 The Bone Clocks is certainly concerned with the control of the Other – the war between Horology and the Anchorites is symbolically and explicitly about the control or conquest of the Other and their stories. Mitchell goes to the extent of applying perhaps unsubtle political correctness – the good characters (the Horologists) in this war for souls are the non-Western ethnically diverse characters, and the bad characters are “the All Whites”. This distinction of white as “bad” does, however, draw attention to the novel’s simultaneous respect for, and orientalisation of, the ethnic Other.

In the case of Esther Little, the “Othering’ of the Noongar serves a political point. In Uncanny Australia, Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs explore the place of Indigenous culture in modern Australian life and politics. They observe that “many Aboriginal claims for sacredness depend on stressing the fact that their view of the land is entirely different to [sic], and distinct from, ‘ours’ – and that ‘we’ can never hope to understand it…”.398 This sentiment was famously reiterated in 1991 by the then Prime Minister of Australia, Bob Hawke, who acknowledged that “they [Indigenous Australians] are outside of an

396 David Mitchell, interview by Kelly Frame, 25 May 2015, Sydney. 397 Celia Wallhead and Marie-Luise Kohlke, “The Neo-Victorian Frame of Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas: Temporal and Traumatic Reverberations,” 219. 398 Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs, Uncanny Australia, 18. intellectual framework with which most of us are comfortable”.399 In this sense, the Othering of Esther Little and the inaccessibility of the Noongar sacred testifies to a wisdom so profound it cannot be articulated, and therefore controlled, by an outsider. Marinus certainly regards Esther with awe – when she enters his mind and scans his memories, he feels “like a third-rate poet showing his doggerel to a Shakespeare” (BC 415). This regard for Esther and her people does not obviate the problems of marginalisation that occur when the Indigenous are positioned as “Other”, however, the Neo-Victorian frame of the pertinent section of the narrative - the self-consciously limited perspective of Marinus - is a way of acknowledging, rather than attempting to resolve, this problematic. Kohlke and Gutleben explore this in great detail, making the argument that “Neo-Victorian fictions do not pretend to be ‘real’ first-hand or secondary witness statements, but only re-imagined acts of after-witness”.400 This frame of “after- witness” is important because it acknowledges the political tensions of speaking for the Other, while designating the distance necessary to preserve a sense of the uncanny.

The final defining aspect of identity explored in the novel is the experience of time. The significance of time to the Horologists is signified in their choice of a collective name. Horology, rather than clock-making, was originally defined as the “measurement of time”. The immortality of the Horologists would suggest that they experience time differently from humans, and without the eschatological certainty that motivated Hugo Lamb. Marinus admits to experiencing the “Ennui of Eternity”, exacerbated by the Horologist’s inability to procreate (BC 488). The Horologists can, however, die if they are touched by the “Dusk” or if their souls are wounded by “psychoseteric” blasts projected by the Anchorites. Only Holly and Marinus escape the Chapel of the Dusk at the climax of “An Horologist’s Labyrinth”; all the other Horologists are killed, as well as the Anchorites, with the exception of a penitent Hugo Lamb.401 Although death does not loom imminently (or immanently) for the Horologists, they are defined by their empathy for those that do face death, in particular the kind of death caused by the Anchorites’ soul-decanting (this being illustrated in further detail in Mitchell’s most recent novel, entitled Slade House). For the most part, death is experienced by the Horologists as part of the cycle of rebirth. The Horologists’ access to the Script

399 Ibid. 400 Celia Wallhead and Marie-Luise Kohlke, “The Neo-Victorian Frame of Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas: Temporal and Traumatic Reverberations,” 18. 401 Hugo’s relapse into sentimentality is spontaneous and rather uncharacteristic. His rather unconvincing change of heart is another example of the discordant cliché that occasionally undermines the narrative. similarly presents a model of time that is not linear. In the first chapter, Xi Lo, who has taken residence in the body of Holly’s younger brother, Jacko, prophesises Holly’s future. He gives her a drawing that (unknown to her at the time) maps the diabolical labyrinth of the Chapel of the Dusk. He begs her to hold on to the drawing and to “Promise me you’ll memorise the path through it, so if you ever needed to, you could navigate it in the darkness. Please” (BC 8). Only in the fifth chapter, decades later, does Holly understand the significance of Jacko’s/Xi Lo’s gift, which literally saves her life. Esther Little is similarly gifted with an understanding of the Script, and she foresees the time of her return amongst the Horologists. Time for the Horologists is planetary – both in the historical scope of their “metalives” and in the experience of temporal hybridity produced by the commingling of the present and the future through prophesy. The setting of “An Horologist’s Labyrinth”, however, marks an unusual point in human history. Marinus updates Esther with the state of the world under the throes of climate change. She remarks that “The future looks a lot like the past”, and Marinus reflects that this reversal in human fortunes is “the inevitable result […] of population growth and lies about oil reserves” (BC 479). These examples and discussions of time as cyclical and hybridised are designed to impart significance and influence to every human action. The events of the past cannot be discounted from the tenets of the present and the expectations for the future. The real point of difference between the Horologists and “normal” humans is the former’s greater awareness of these planetary connections.

The final chapter of The Bone Clocks, entitled “Sheep’s Head”, revisits Holly Sykes in the year 2043. Holly lives on the coast of Ireland with her granddaughter Lorelei and adopted grandson Rafiq. It is revealed that Aoife and her husband Orvar had perished five years earlier when a “Gigastorm” brought down over two hundred airplanes over the Pacific (BC 523). Holly’s neighbour is Mo Muntervary, the quantum physicist who designed the Zookeeper in Ghostwritten. “Sheep’s Head” describes the beginning of the “Endarkenment” of Europe. The meltdown of the “Hinkley E” nuclear reactor in England results in the emission of radiation. The internet has effectively crashed and the villagers live on rations supplied by the governing body known as “Stability”. Alongside the devastation caused by the nuclear meltdown, global warming produces severe weather. Holly recalls that “Footage of catastrophes flowed so thick and fast through the thirties that it was hard to keep track of which coastal region had been devastated this week, or which city had been decimated by Ebola or Ratflu” (BC 525). The exorbitant use of unsustainable fuel in the past has caused a dangerous shortage in Mitchell’s vision of the near-future. Fuel-deprivation results in the regression of modern lifestyles, and indeed civilisation. Holly ruminates that “For most of my life, the world shrank and technology progressed: this was the natural order of things” (BC 566). The reversal of “the natural order of things” produces chaos and barbarism, and Holly fears for the safety of her granddaughter in a society reverting to medievalism. Marauders and gangs threaten to overrun Sheep’s Head after Shanghai reneges on its trade agreement with Ireland. The increasingly fraught conditions in Sheep’s Head begin to resemble Ed Brubeck’s description of Iraq in 2004. Holly’s comments on the precariousness of civilisation reinforce this correlation: “Civilisation’s like the economy, or Tinkerbell: if people stop believing it’s real, it dies” (BC 572).

At the end of the chapter, Marinus – in another incarnation – arrives at Sheep’s Head in a ship from Iceland. He informs Holly that “We operate a think tank. L’Ohkna named it – modestly – ‘Prescience’ before I arrived” (BC 590). The Prescients are a race of people who appear in the “Sloosha’s Crossin’” chapter of Cloud Atlas. The Prescients, unlike the primitive Valleymen of Cloud Atlas, are versed in the history of civilisation, and have preserved scientific and technological knowledge from before the nuclear apocalypse.402 Marinus offers to take Lorelei and Rafiq to Iceland to live among the Prescients, however, he cannot extend the invitation to Holly. As she watches her grandchildren leave, Holly is conscious that her story is ending. The final sentence of the novel is a metafictional allusion to the nature of Mitchell’s fiction. His novels engage with each other, and every book contributes to the macrocosmic storyline that Mitchell is unfolding. Holly’s life and story is merely one component of this grand tale, and in order for the next instalment of Mitchell’s universe to begin, she must become a spectre in its past:

Incoming waves erase all traces of the vanishing boat, and I’m feeling erased myself, fading away into an invisible woman. For one voyage to begin, another voyage must come to an end, sort of. (BC 595) These final sentences of The Bone Clocks summarise the novel’s preoccupation with past actions as erased and invisible, yet simultaneously influential and residual. Holly’s story has only “sort of” come to an end, yet the consequences of her actions are felt long

402 David Mitchell, interview by Kelly Frame, 25 May 2015, Sydney. Mitchell has indicated that his next novel will be set in Iceland, and will focus on the lives of the Prescients. after her role is finished in Mitchell’s multiverse. The ritual goodnight chant shared between Holly, Aoife, and Lorelei encapsulates this notion of the residual, hence Holly is consoled by the hope that “We sort of live on, as long as there are people to live on in” (BC 526).

The Bone Clocks is a complex novel that exemplifies the palimpsestic structuring and political consciousness that have become associated with Mitchell’s writing. If Cloud Atlas can be said to have a “political agenda”, it is to warn its readers that “one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself” (CA 528). The Bone Clocks reprises this warning through an exploration of the uncanny. The sacredness of the land in Aboriginal religion, as conveyed in “Crispin Hershey’s Lonely Planet” and “An Horologist’s Labyrinth”, can be read as a call for environmentalism. If there is wisdom to be found in the land, if the soul is a manifestation of the land, then it follows that the land itself must be preserved. Modernity has threatened the planet by excessive exploitation of natural resources and the creation of world-destroying technologies such as nuclear weapons. The inherent value of the land which has been “repressed” returns to our consciousness, and the experience is unsettling. The Bone Clocks mobilises the uncanny as a method of bringing “something unfamiliar to our deepest knowledge and emotional understanding of life and society”.403 The Bone Clocks traverses a number of social crises, such as classism, ageism, racism, and environmentalism, in an attempt to give voice and presence to the marginalised. By demonstrating the planetary interconnectedness of humanity, Mitchell seeks to motivate a revaluation of the ways we treat other human beings and the planet.

403 Francesco Ricatti, “The Emotion of Truth and the Racial Uncanny: Aborigines and Sicilians in Australia,” 130 Conclusion: Slade House and the Planetary Mandate for Mitchell’s “über-readers” “All of you strangle your consciences, and ethically you strike yourselves dumb.” - Marinus404 The moon-grey cat makes a startling appearance in Mitchell’s most recent novel, Slade House. The narrator of the first section, entitled “The Right Sort”, discovers the cat’s body in a bleak alleyway. The corpse is being mutilated by flies. Mitchell has described the scene as

[…] a message to my über-readers to say there’s going to be no help here. Don’t rely on this magic cat fairy to come along and save the day—it’s gone. Cats don’t really die, but as long as you think it’s gone, that’s mission accomplished.405 Slade House is a gothic tale about a pair of evil twins, Norah and Jonah Grayer, who (similar to the Anchorites) lure people to their ghostly home in order to ingest their souls. The first four narrators of the novel fall victim to these characters. In each of these cases, no-one is able to save the day. The themes, social concerns and aesthetic style that define Mitchell’s earlier novels are revisited in Slade House. The planetary nature of Being and time, the crisis of cognitive mapping, questions of agency and fate, and the devastating fragmentation of the individual are all explored through the lens of the gothic genre, culminating in an affirmation of the individual’s moral obligation to humanity. The discussion of Slade House that follows will bring the conclusions of this thesis’ preceding chapters into sharper focus with the expectation of answering my central question: how does Mitchell reconcile postmodern literary techniques with a vision of the planetary and, if the reconciliation is successful, what philosophical or political statement is he seeking to make?

Slade House is a horror story about predacity, consumption, and exploitation. The novel began as a short story entitled “The Right Sort” that Mitchell published via Twitter in 2014. It is written in five parts, each set nine years apart, with the first chapter set in 1979. Each chapter is narrated by a different character, these being in order of appearance: Nathan Bishop, an autistic boy who resembles Jason Taylor (and the

404 David Mitchell, Slade House, (Sceptre: Australia, 2015), 230. Further references to this edition will be included in the text in parentheses with the acronym “SH”. 405 David Mitchell, “‘Ghosts are the Fucked-Up Dead’: An Interview with David Mitchell,” interview by Mike Doherty, Hazlitt, October 30, 2015, accessed March 3, 2016, http://hazlitt.net/feature/ghosts-are- fucked-dead-interview-david-mitchell. subject of “The Right Sort”); Detective Inspector Gordon Edmonds, a misogynistic divorcee investigating the disappearance of Nathan and his mother; Sally Timms, an overweight and unconfident university student who joins a group of paranormal enthusiasts engaged in exploring the Slade Alley abductions; Freya Timms, a journalist who is retracing the final moments of her missing sister (Sally); and, finally, Norah, describes her fateful encounter with the immortal vigilante Iris Marinus-Fenby. Each chapter follows the same formula: the visitor to the house is confronted with an illusion and manipulated into entering the attic of the house where the twins stage their attack. Mitchell has remarked that this formula is vital to instilling dread in the reader, observing that: “[…] it’s because it sets up that awful inevitability— you’ve been here before, and you’ve seen how badly it ended then, and here we go again. It’s that “Nooooo!” that’s so enjoyable”.406

The novel continues the indictment of late capitalism, conveyed in all Mitchell’s major works. On this occasion the indictment is delivered through the gothic monster metaphor. Genre is established within the text by a number of formulaic plot and setting details, including the mist-enwrapped mansion that appears and then vanishes for years (like Brigadoon); the creation of dread and suspense through rumour (which is predictably ignored by the foolhardy protagonists who enter the House); the seductively malignant villains; the eerie portraits that line the staircase; and, the ghostly whispers and emanations of doom that surprise the protagonists and startle the reader.407 These generic features of the gothic mood are reinforced by allusion to other gothic or uncanny texts. Slade House, like Mitchell’s other works, is replete with intertextual allusion, and can be read as Mitchell’s homage to Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Otomo Katsuhiro’s Akira, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The echoes of these novels in Slade House are not superficial revisions of James’ ghostly figures and Wilde’s enchanted portrait. Instead, they anchor Slade House within the political tradition of the gothic. Of course, gothic elements are present throughout all of Mitchell’s fiction, but this particular novel is a sustained example of the genre. Maggie Kilgour contends that the gothic genre arose in reaction to the bourgeois revolutions that emerged with modernisation and industrialisation.408 David Punter and Glennis Byron have argued that the gothic genre arose from the

406 David Mitchell, “‘Ghosts are the Fucked-Up Dead’: An Interview with David Mitchell.” 407 Vincente Minelli, Brigadoon, 1954, Warner Home Video, 2005, DVD. 408 Maggie Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel, (London: Routledge, 1995), 12. increasing impact of capitalist culture on the individual, as “Emergent capitalism led to a growing sense of isolation and alienation, as increasing mechanization divorced workers from the products of their labour, and the urban centres disconnected them from the natural world”.409 Their description resonates with Jameson’s Marxist critique of postmodern culture as well as the depictions of life under capitalism in Ghostwritten, number9dream, and Cloud Atlas. Slade House explores the fragmentation of the individual as represented in the evil Norah and Jonah. As Kilgour notes,

The gothic villain is frequently an example of the modern materialistic individual taken to an extreme, at which he becomes an egotistical and wilful threat to social unity and order.410 Norah and Jonah are members of a cosmopolitan elite who chase material pleasure and wilfully exploit anyone who enters their orbit. In the first chapter of Slade House, entitled “The Right Sort”, Jonah becomes the personification of hunger. He tells the narrator, Nathan Bishop, of a recurring nightmare in which he is running out of food. Notably, it is the kind of “Food that makes you hungrier, the more of it you eat”. There is an echo here of the critique offered by Adorno and Horkheimer of capitalism as the “circle of manipulation and retroactive need” (SH 19).411 In a scene characterised by its circularity, Jonah and Nathan chase each other around Slade House before the game takes a sinister turn:

Then, at the far end of the brambly side path, Jonah appears, and I relax for a second because he’ll know what to do, but as I watch, the running-boy shape gets fuzzier and becomes a growling darkness with darker eyes, eyes that know me, and fangs that’ll finish what they started and it’s pounding after me in sickening slow motion, big as a cantering horse and I’d scream if I could but I can’t my chest’s full of molten panic it’s choking me choking it’s wolves it’s winter it’s bone it’s cartilage skin liver lungs it’s Hunger it’s Hunger it’s Hunger and Run! (SH 24) In the chapter on Cloud Atlas, I observed that Meronym blames “human hunger” for the collapse of civilisation. Norah and Jonah are eventually undone by their cannibalistic pursuits, leaving numerous victims dead in their wake. Norah justifies preying on others by framing her hunger as an inescapable part of nature and an unavoidable human trait,

409 David Punter and Glennis Byron, The Gothic, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 20. 410 Maggie Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel, 12. 411 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, 121. dismissing outright her second victim’s bewildered plea that he did not deserve to be attacked:

‘What does “deserve” have to do with anything?’ Norah Grayer lifts her sharp eyebrows. ‘Did the pig whose smoked flesh you ate at breakfast “deserve” her fate? The question’s irrelevant. You desired bacon and she couldn’t escape the abattoir. We desire your soul to power our operandi, and you can’t escape our lacuna. That’s it.’ (SH 79) Norah’s rationalisation for her conduct corresponds with similar justifications of predacity expressed by Morty Dhondt, Henry Goose, Kemal, Ross Wilcox, Enomoto and Imaculée Constantin, among other characters in Mitchell’s fiction. Essentially, they express the view that humanity and civilisations are governed by an evolutionary impulse; that exploitation and entropy are indeed, “written in our nature”, to use Adam Ewing’s phrase (CA 528). Kilgour suggests that this view is characteristically gothic:

The gothic is thus a nightmare vision of a modern world made up of detached individuals, which has dissolved into predatory and demonic relations which cannot be reconciled into a healthy social order.412 The individuals are not merely detached within capitalistic culture; they are also fragmented, and Kelly Hurley’s monograph on gothic literature emphasises a preoccupation with the “ruination of the human subject” in the genre.413 The great crime of Norah and Jonah is less the physical murder of their victims than that they cleave their victims’ souls in two. The ghost of Gordon (the second victim) laments his fate to Sally (the third victim). He says: “‘They. . . don’t . . . e . . . ven . . . let . . . you . . . die . . . pro . . . per . . . ly’” (SH 115). The ghosts are not full emanations of the deceased individuals. They are “leftovers” and “residue” (SH 69, 82). The fracturing of selfhood is recast and presented in Slade House as a fate worse than death. It is – quite literally – to be left eternally in a dehumanised state. Boulter’s theorisation of the posthuman is applicable to any of the ghosts in Slade House, as the posthuman “emerges as it looks back on what was (temporally and ontologically)” and “is conditioned by an all-too-

412 Maggie Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel, 12. 413 Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3. human desire to be human”.414 Hurley proposes a different set of criteria for the gothic figure or monster as “abhuman”:

The prefix “ab-” signals a movement away from a site or condition, and thus a loss. But a movement away from is also a movement towards – towards a site or condition as yet unspecified – and thus entails both a threat and a promise.415 The notion that one can be “ab” human presupposes that humanity is spatially defined – it is a “site” as much as a “condition”. This definition of Being is reinforced by the novel’s insistence that the soul and the body are conjoined (even in death), and the severing of that connection produces a loss. This loss is essentially a crisis of cognitive mapping in which the conscious self is no longer able to locate itself in physical environs. Norah and Jonah are abhumans themselves. They are able to leave their bodies in the time-sealed “lacuna” of Slade House and possess other humans so long as the lacuna is maintained by the harvested souls of the psychically gifted (individuals resembling Holly Sykes of The Bone Clocks). The twins wilfully embrace this state of abhumanity, one which can only be sustained by debasing others. Consequently, the gothic villain of Slade House is abhuman and a figuration of the individual under capitalism, the association between these two states underscoring Mitchell’s evolving critique of late capitalism.

The “condition” from which the abhuman is moving away is the temporal condition of Being. In the case of Norah and Jonah, their immortality is dependent upon encasing their bodies in a pocket of timeless, unreal space. This space is created through the souls of others. Essentially, the souls of Norah’s and Jonah’s victims absorb time so that the twins’ bodies are not subject to the passing of time. In a narrative reminiscent of Dorian Gray, the prospect of immortality does not inspire the twins to live noble lives. Unlike Dorian Gray, they do not express guilt or reveal a conflicted conscience over their “monstrous soul-life”.416 Immortality divests the twins of Being-towards-death and, again to invoke Kermode and Benjamin, without the authority of death one cannot assign meaning to life. Marinus gives this notion qualified affirmation when she asks Norah (rhetorically), “What’s a metalife without a mission?” and then promptly supplies the answer: “It’s mere feeding” (SH 230). Marinus, an immortal herself, does

414 Jonathon Boulter, “Posthuman Temporality: Mitchell’s Ghostwritten,” 25, 29. 415 Ibid., 4. 416 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray. In The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings, (ed.) Richard Ellman, (New York: Bantam Dell, 2005), 210. not experience Being-towards-death in the same way as humans because she is caught in the cycle of reincarnation. Her mission – to rid the world of soul-eating predators such as the twins – nevertheless offers her an “ending” (victory) towards which she can direct her life and find meaning and purpose.

In the final moments of Slade House, Marinus expresses her contempt for Norah’s worldview (and by extension, that of all Mitchell’s fictional advocates for human predacity):

‘No,’ Marinus scrunches up her face, ‘please, no. I’ve heard it so often. “Humanity is hardwired for survival”; “Might is Right is nature’s way”; “We only harvest a few”; Again and again, down the years, same old same old […] from feudal lords to slave traders to oligarchs to neocons to predators like you. All of you strangle your consciences, and ethically you strike yourselves dumb.’ (SH 230) Marinus rejects the notion that the individual is controlled by predatory instincts, citing the existence of conscience and the effect of ethical sensibilities. She articulates the political position that has been developed throughout Mitchell’s oeuvre – that the individual has the agency and the moral obligation to act on behalf of the greater good. Of all Mitchell’s protagonists, Marinus appears to be the most authoritative on this point. She has the capacity to observe the long-term effects of her activities because her planetary life spans the rise and fall of empires. From this perspective she can see not only the patterns of the system but also the fluctuations (as described by Sarah Dillon) that propel life towards a bifurcation point. This is not, of course, the vantage point of most of Mitchell’s characters, who are arrested in medias res, just as the reader is caught in the middle of things in their own lives. Eiji begins running and Jason begrudgingly faces a new school year that is full of unknowns. Sonmi is executed without the reassurance that her declarations will bring down Corpocracy. Holly is left on a beach wondering if her grandchildren will be saved by her act of sacrifice. The ghosts of Slade House are consumed by their attempts to warn victims of their impending danger. The uncertainty implicit in being in medias res is magnified by the culture of late capitalism which fragments the individual and, through the overwhelming flow of media messages and prolific urbanisation, produces a crisis of cognitive mapping. Mitchell’s fiction marries a planetary scope with these postmodern illustrations of individual life in order to map out, as it were, the foremost barrier impeding wider social change: the perception that change is impossible. Mitchell’s planetary postmodern fiction is representative of the “new political art” first proposed by Fredric Jameson in 1991. This new form transcends the earlier limitations of postmodern art by not only representing the “world space of multinational capital”, but by locating the individual and the collective in that space, thereby granting them the conditions within which they can stage social reform.417 Throughout this thesis I have sought to demonstrate the ways in which Mitchell depicts the “the truth of postmodernism” and the essence of the postmodern condition.418 In discussing Ghostwritten I argued that the setting of the novel – Japan in the immediate aftermath of the sarin gas attacks – signalled the novel’s interest in the postmodern era of late capitalism. The narratives that comprise the novel explore the nature of Being in a postmodern era, establishing that Dasein is temporally constituted and spatially defined. These aspects of Being are threatened by postmodern culture with the majority of Mitchell’s characters express the crisis of cognitive mapping. They are unable to locate themselves in space, time, or community. They consequently look for, or subscribe to, narratives to provide clarity and affirm their sense of self. In analysing number9dream I identified Eiji’s struggle to define himself unmediated by the hyperreal. His quest to discover his father is a symbolic quest for a grand narrative that will validate his being and erase past traumas. Narrative, Mitchell implies, is the medium through which humans attempt to understand themselves and the world. In my chapter on Cloud Atlas I contend that the novel is vitally concerned with how narratives of the past and the future can “neutralise”, to use Jameson’s phrase, any capacity to pursue reform.419

Mitchell’s fiction does not invite the reader to look for a reality beyond narrative per se. In this very crucial sense the novels are expression of postmodernism as well as critiques of postmodernity. By reframing every account of truth as narrative or metanarrative, Mitchell’s novels interrogate existing metanarratives that encourage or allow the exploitation of peoples and the environment. The claim that “the human world is made of stories, not people” is not presented to the reader as a form of nihilism in Mitchell’s novels; rather the emphasis on stories encourages the pursuit of relative, but nevertheless significant, truths (GW 386). Each protagonist of Cloud Atlas is connected to the narratives of their predecessors or successors, and this can be viewed as a postmodern destabilisation unless one takes the view that people are only ever

417 Ibid., 92. 418 Ibid. 419 Ibid. connected through their stories in the first place. For Linda Hutcheon, “Narrative is what translates knowing into telling”.420 In the introduction to The Reason I Jump, Mitchell describes the human mind as being managed by an “editor in residence”.421 Autism is marked by the lack of a “mind-editor” and Mitchell speculates that “this unedited, unfiltered and scary-as-all-hell reality is home”.422 The inability to formulate narratives (by editing thoughts and memories) complicates and, in cases like that of Naoki Higashida, impedes interaction with other people. The description of autism in these terms embodies Mitchell’s assessment of the significance of narrative to human interconnectivity.

In Cloud Atlas Adam Ewing describes the glimpse of “a Truer truth”. This notion was useful in my analysis of Black Swan Green, in which I illustrated the means by which Jason progressively develops a more coherent, authentic sense of self and way of Being. He is, of course, still in the process of growing and maturing, but rather than fracturing and suppressing the aspects of his personality that do not conform with the social narratives of what he should be, he begins to embrace that personality. The coherent self or “one you” comes into being through narrative expression in Black Swan Green. I contend in the sixth and seventh chapters of the thesis that The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and The Bone Clocks depict the vital importance of being represented in narratives of history. The emphasis on narrative is established and sustained through innumerable instances of metafiction and intertextuality throughout Mitchell’s oeuvre. The similarly prevalent theme of planetary interconnectivity is supported by the reframing of people, their perspectives and the world as stories.

My analysis recounted here focuses on the individual characters who experience the “truth of postmodernism”. Thereafter I illustrated how Mitchell re-contextualises the individual within a planetary system. The structural configurations of Ghostwritten, Cloud Atlas, and The Bone Clocks create a planetary panorama. Slade House is designed in much the same way in that it affirms the association between this trans- temporal, multi-perspectival narrative structure and Mitchell’s fiction. These structural configurations emphasise the interconnections between people as part of a world-system which is reinforced by the author’s invitation to consider the novels collectively as part

420 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 121. 421 David Mitchell, “Introduction”. In Naoki Higashida, The Reason I Jump, 2. 422 Ibid., 2, 3. of a multiverse. Mitchell’s fiction transcends the temporal boundaries of the Anthropocene through the spaces and characters that are imbued with a sense of the planetary. The demarcation of the planetary over the Anthropocene is significant because Mitchell’s narratives reject the human-centric focus of Anthropocene thought. Nature exerts its power in the typhoons and earthquakes of number9dream and the landscapes of Iceland and Australia are depicted in portentous tones. In Slade House, even Jonah (disguised as Fred Pink) confesses that “Places change you, Miss Timms, and deserts change us pale Northerners so much, our own mothers wouldn’t recognise us” (SH 157). The depiction of nature as powerful and uncanny challenges a capitalist position that effectively diminishes the environment to the status of resource. In Mitchell’s vision, humanity is not the master of the environment, but a constituent in a natural biosphere alongside flora and fauna. Pretensions to the contrary in Mitchell’s fiction eventually result in the destruction of both civilisation and nature. The planetary perspective of Mitchell’s fiction necessarily involves a plea for the reinstatement of nature in symbiosis with humanity.

Mitchell’s planetary vision also positions individuals and collective subjects, endowing them with the capacity to struggle in two ways. First, the individual’s endeavours to resist oppression may seem futile in medias res but they can produce fluctuations in an otherwise overbearing system which can lead to reform (an effect that is only perceived from a planetary vantage point). Second, individuals and collective subjects are repositioned as constituents of a natural system that is increasingly destabilised by the processes of capital. As constituents they are implicated in, and morally culpable for, the destruction of the environment.

In the introduction to this thesis I asserted that Mitchell is an influential voice in the emerging field of climate-change literature. The political statement discernible in his planetary postmodern fiction is a demand that humanity show respect for the environment, that we seek better mechanisms for preventing the oppression and exploitation of minorities, and that unsustainable processes of production need to be halted. Novels can and often do contribute to public rhetoric on contemporary contentious issues. Mitchell has expressed his reservations about the influence of novelists (and poets), yet his novels are characterised by a moral outrage and they challenge the reader to share in, and act upon, this outrage. What Mitchell’s fiction does not offer (nor, to be fair, does it pretend to offer) are practical or political programs for achieving the kind of social and ecological sustainability that he plainly believes is conceivable (even if his vision of utopia is “the hardest of worlds to make real” (CA 528)). Mitchell’s fiction – the “new political art” – enables individuals and collective subjects to act and struggle towards a new and better future although the form of that struggle has yet to reach his novels. The dialectical or “thesis and antithesis” approach of Mitchell’s fiction effectively undermines any affirmative call to action that might resonate with any fully formed philosophical or political platform. For the moment, the reader is left with small, contingent utopias with which to be inspired, such as the community living outside Nea So Copros or with the Valleysmen of Cloud Atlas. It is possible that Mitchell’s next novel, which centres on the environmentally-conscious Prescients, might explore in more specific terms how weathering global environmental catastrophe might be achieved .423

My aim in this thesis has been to provide an overview of the ways in which Mitchell’s seven novels to date can and ought to be considered as planetary postmodern texts and to interpret the philosophical and political statements that Mitchell is making through these texts. I have elucidated the postmodern techniques and planetary concerns that pervade and enliven Mitchell’s fiction. I have established the role of metafiction, genre and intertextual allusion. I have also explained that closer attention and further research on these specific areas – beyond the limits imposed by the thesis form – would enrich disciplinary understanding of Mitchell’s fiction given the pervasiveness and predominance of these techniques in his work. In particular, as I indicated in the introduction, considering Mitchell’s engagement with cinematic texts would not only illuminate his body of work but contribute to a more general understanding of the influence of film and television on the modern novel as well. A similar investigation into the significance of music to Mitchell’s writing would be productive not only because he alludes to compositions and depicts musicians, but because he has contributed to both the shape and substance of opera and contemporary music (in the form of Kate Bush’s Before the Dawn). Examining the role of surveillance in his novels – an issue that Rose Harris-Birtill and I have raised – would also serve to add depth and breadth to elucidating Mitchell’s critique of capitalism. Further, my account of the planetary element in Mitchell’s work might promote discussion of the connection between gender and the environment. Indeed, a feminist eco-critical perspective on

423 David Mitchell, interview with the author, 25 May 2015, Sydney. Mitchell’s fiction would yield some fascinating insights. Further research would do well, however, to include the work of Mitchell’s contemporaries. Without their perspectives it will be very difficult to gain a clearer understanding or a deeper grasp of Mitchell’s place in the evolving literature of climate-change.

My aim has been to establish and to explicate a number of emerging lines of inquiry into David Mitchell’s work. Clearly, there is scope for more extensive inquiry into the aesthetics and politics of his fiction. The approach that I have taken differs from that of a number of critics of Mitchell’s work, in that it does not seek to restrict a reading of Mitchell’s fiction within the boundaries of a single, particular sub-genre of the novel (as, for example, postmodern or cosmopolitan). The eclecticism of his work (in terms of genre, setting, and perspective) is the most distinctive feature of his “style”, and any attempt to capture the essence, as it were, of his work, must account for this multifariousness.

The abiding significance of David Mitchell’s novels has yet to be determined. Not yet fifty, he continues to write prolifically and his work will be subjected to ongoing scrutiny. This thesis, then, offers an interim assessment containing interpretations limited to extant work. As he adds to an already impressive body of work, I have offered an analytical approach to his novels that would allow the reader of a single work to gain a sense of the overarching themes recurring in every work. While I have canvassed a range of issues revealing the complexity of his fiction, the most innovative and significant qualities are plainly those realising Fredric Jameson’s conception of “a new political art”. Mitchell’s existing novels exemplify this new form. I have termed this form “planetary postmodernism”. It is the connecting theme in much of his work to date and, if the past is any guide, it is likely his future work will expand on this aesthetic. In sum, I believe that his innovative aesthetic in conjunction with a compelling and compassionate environmental and humanitarian message will come to define his influence on contemporary literature and his contribution to the continuing importance of the novel in modern life. Mitchell himself is reluctant explicitly to profess a political agenda or affiliation, but he does concede that his novels posit an argument for:

Humanism, [and can we] treat people decently, can we please get past our bigotries – me included. Can we look at the value of human beings for what they are, I mean, Martin Luther King said it so much better, not just on ethnic issues but also on sexual orientation issues also on class issues, also on special needs/disabilities issues. Let’s just be human to each other, and let’s be kind. That’s a – is that political agenda? If you call it humanism and maybe liberal aspirations, maybe it is a political agenda.424 Irrespective of Mitchell’s unwillingness to affirm an overtly political intention, his novels are deeply conscious of the “State of the World” as in crisis. Mitchell’s status as a highly regarded contemporary author, and the existing trend in fiction towards a focus on the environment and climate change, would suggest that he is part of a highly politicized movement in literature.

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