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GHOSTREADING: RETRO-SPECTRAL INTERPRETATIONS IN THE NOVELS OF

By DALENE LABUSCHAGNE

Thesis Submitted In Fulfilment Of The Requirements For The Degree

PhD In ENGLISH In The FACULTY OF HUMANITIES At The UNIVERSITY OF JOHANNESBURG

Supervisor: Prof. Karen Scherzinger August 2018

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to express my deepest gratitude to the following people:

Prof. Craig MacKenzie, colleague and mentor, not only for supervising this thesis in the formative early stages, but also for fostering my intellectual growth over the course of more than two decades. This project could not have been brought to completion without your sustained support.

Prof. Karen Scherzinger, posthumously, for taking over the task of supervising this thesis at a critical juncture, and for the enthusiastic engagement that ensured my continued zeal. Thank you for your dedication, and for reading all of the material – however tedious at times – pertaining to my work in order to assist in bringing this project to a close. I will never be resigned.

Dr Bridget Grogan, my friend and colleague, for her tireless efforts in seeing to the administrative demands of the assessment processes. You surely suffered more sleepless nights than I did.

Prof. Sikhumbuzo Mngadi, current Head of the Department of English, for granting me the space to write this thesis. Your sage and good-natured backing contributed immensely to my completing this project.

All my colleagues in the Department of English at the UJ, for your kind encouragement and support, at seminars and conferences, as well as when passing each other in the corridors. I am enormously privileged to work and do research in such congenial company.

My family and friends, for standing by me for the long haul, and putting up with my inevitable mood swings.

My daughter, Lauren, for your invaluable insights when it came to grammar use and style. Chapter 2 belongs to you.

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Abstract: In the course of the past nineteen years or so, the novels of British author David Mitchell have been steadily garnering critical scrutiny, with the focus of scholarly interest ranging from postmodernist narrative forms, the Bildungsroman, and discursive identity, to the Utopian, science fiction, and postcolonialism, among many others. Such diverse approaches hinge on the eclectic use of genre in these works, not only from one novel to the next, but more often than not also within a single text. By thus disrupting genre-compliant writing, these novels can be said to work deconstructively to destabilize conventional modes of reading and interpretation. As a result, the formation of the subject – be this the writer, the protagonist-narrator, and/or the reader – is fitfully traced in the interstices between ever-changing syntagmatic and paradigmatic levels of signification. Hence the figure of this composite subject is always in the process of becoming, never fully formed or fully present. One could speak here of the subject as a spectral shape that haunts the pages of the text, much as the plotlines of Mitchell’s novels are haunted by uncanny encounters, virtual personalities, return appearances, and supernatural. Within this framework, I aim to show in this study how Mitchell’s writing rehearses the vagaries of the reading process. In the process, I focus on the narrative structure of three specific novels – what I would call the inaugural trio consisting of , number9dream, and , insofar as they could be seen to lay the groundwork for the ever-expanding, endlessly shifting fictional world of what Mitchell himself thinks of as his “über-novel” (Huff Post Books, 9 June 2015). I pay close attention to certain, possibly less familiar aspects of narrativity, namely the uncanny, intertextuality, and singularity. Using these three schemes, respectively, in my reading of the three inaugural novels, I seek to demonstrate that Mitchell’s narrative innovations revoke our persistent compulsion to identify ‘the’ reader, but without doing away with the person doing the reading. In short, I aim to show how Mitchell’s writing invites what Valentine Cunningham calls “tactful” readings that would secure “the presence, the rights, the needs of the human subject” (2002: 143).

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Abbreviations

CA Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell (: , 2004). g ghostwritten, David Mitchell, (London: Sceptre, 1999). n9d number9dream, David Mitchell, (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2001).

BC , David Mitchell, (Sceptre, 2014).

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page Acknowledgements ii Abstract iii Abbreviations iv Table of contents v-vi

Chapter 1: Introduction – reading (and) the reader 2 1.1. Preamble 2 1.2. Readings of Mitchell’s inaugural trio 4 1.3. The subject of/in some theories of reading and interpretation 8 1.4. Subjectivity and identity 13 1.5. The uncanny 16 1.6. Intertextuality 18 1.7. Singularity 21

Chapter 2: The uncanny in the narrative structure of ghostwritten 25 Part 1: The perpetual recycling of the subject 25 Part 2: Spectral reading 39 2. 2.1. “Okinawa”: fact-based fiction 39 2.2.3. “Tokyo”: a love story 42 2.2.4. The haunting in “Hong Kong” 45 2.2.5. “Holy Mountain”: a personal history 50 2.2.6. Magic realism in “Mongolia” 54 2.2.7. A crime thriller in “Petersburg” 58 2.2.8. “London”: a philosophical deliberation 65 2.2.9. Science to Science Fiction: “Clear Island” and “Night Train” 70

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Chapter 3: Intertextual reading in number9dream 79 Part 1: Intertextuality in the narrative structure of number9dream 79 Part 2: Rehearsing the reading of number9dream 98 3.2.1. “Panopticon”: overwriting reality 98 3.2.2. “Lost Property”: reality-in-becoming 100 3.2.3. “Video Games”: virtual reality 102 3.2.4. “Reclaimed Land”: unimaginable reality 103 3.2.5. “Study of Tales”: fabulous reality 105 3.2.6. “Kai Ten”: identity, in reality 110 3.2.7. “Cards”: reality, by chance 112 3.2.8. “The Language of Mountains is Rain”: reality reversed 115 3.2.9. Conclusion: intertextual reading 116

Chapter 4: Cloud Atlas: the future-to-come 121 Part 1: Remembering the future 121 Part 2: Reading the future-to-come 138 4.2.1. “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing” 138 4.2.2. “Letters from Zedelghem” (and everything after) 150

Chapter 5: Conclusion 161 Readers and reading, in theory 161

Bibliography 172

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Chapter 1 Introduction

Our relation to books is a shadowy space haunted by the ghosts of memory, and the real value of books lies in their ability to conjure these spectres. Pierre Bayard, How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read

1.1. Preamble Over the course of the past nineteen years or so, the works of British novelist David Mitchell have been steadily garnering critical scrutiny. Mitchell’s portfolio is impressive: apart from his seven novels1 to date, he is the author of seventeen short stories, around twelve articles and librettos, as well as three works translated from the Japanese. It is Mitchell’s long fiction works that have drawn the greatest attention, however. His debut novel, ghostwritten (1999), was awarded the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize, and his two subsequent novels, number9dream (2001) and Cloud Atlas (2004), were both shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize – in 2013 the latter was made into a film featuring Tom Hanks and Halle Berry.2 These books were followed by (2006) and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010) and, after another four-year hiatus, by Mitchell’s Booker-longlisted sixth novel, The Bone Clocks (2014). The latest in his range, , was published just recently, in 2015. The outstanding feature of Mitchell’s works is, arguably, their astonishing structural complexity. His novels each present a cunningly wrought design of structural and stylistic elements that are constantly shifting, a chiaroscuro of effects that continually challenges the way in which a reader may perceive the thematic elements of the text. ghostwritten, for example, is structured episodically – each of the nine episodes features a different story and central character, although they are all interwoven through uncanny, seemingly coincidental, circumstances. The second novel, number9dream, takes an altogether different tack, presenting a single first- person narrative that tells of a young man’s search for the father he has never met – it is a bildungsroman in which the narrator’s actual journey in search of identity is juxtaposed with the fantastical, often surreal one of his imagination. In Cloud Atlas Mitchell once again reconceives the narrative structure, devising a plot that consists

1 As reported by Alison Flood in The Guardian (30 May 2016), Mitchell has completed an eighth novel, which is, curiously, slated for publication only in 2114. This enterprise forms part of Scottish artist Katie Paterson’s Future Library project where, each year for the next 100 years, an author will deliver a piece of writing which will only be read in 2114. Margaret Atwood was the first to submit a manuscript, in 2015, of her text entitled Scribbler Moon. The title of Mitchell’s text is From Me Flows What You Call Time, taken from a piece of music of the same name by Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu. There is an intriguing, though not necessarily deliberate parallel between Mitchell’s naming this eighth novel for a musical composition, and the fact that the naming of his third novel, Cloud Atlas, echoes the musical piece The Cloud Atlas Sextet, composed by a character in the novel, Robert Frobisher. In a sense, the Future Library project resembles an archeological enterprise, something that is strongly hinted at in Cloud Atlas. 2 Directed by Lana and Lilly Wachowski, screenplay by Tom Tykwer. 2 of six nested stories, all but the last of which are interrupted at some random moment; after the sixth story concludes at the centre of the book, the novel goes back in time and in history to pick up where it left off and ‘close’ each of the other five accounts. Black Swan Green is again different in that it could be read as a semi- autobiographical novel, narrated by a stammering 13-year-old boy who, given his aspirations to become a writer, seems to be an avatar of Mitchell, himself a stammerer. The fifth novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, is once more a divergence, being an historical novel set during the Dutch trading concession with Japan in the late 18th century. Nestled within the historically factual events recounted here is the romantic fiction centred on a young Dutchman's love for a Japanese midwife who becomes the abductee of a malevolent religious faction. Mitchell’s more recent work, The Bone Clocks, offers yet another structural syncopation, (though similar in composition to ghostwritten) where six distinct temporal phases of the main protagonist’s life are recounted by six different first- person narrators, all within – yet in counterpoint to – the metaphysical context of Good versus Evil. Finally, in Slade House, the narrative structure likewise reprises that of Mitchell’s debut novel, consisting of five episodes told in the style of the haunted-house genre, each recounted by a different first-person narrator who seems to assume the position of the previous narrator, though in a different time that is regulated by nine-year intervals. What is evident in these synopses of Mitchell’s works is that he seems purposely to be making use of as broad a range of generic options as possible, even at times within a single novel. Consequently, there is a sense of his deliberately resisting the convention of settling into a fixed mode of writing, while at the same time also forestalling attempts to fit his individual texts, or his larger body of work, into a determined niche. In their disruption of genre-compliant writing, his novels can be said to work deconstructively, ceaselessly playing along syntagmatic and paradigmatic levels of meaning to destabilize conventional modes of reading and interpretation. As a result, I would argue, the formation of the subject – be this a writer, a protagonist-narrator, a reader – is traced, fitfully, in the interstices between these two levels of signification, in the recursive spaces between one linguistic event and the other (both preceding and successive). In these spaces, the figure of the subject is always in the process of becoming, never fully formed or fully present. One could speak here of the subject as a spectral shape that haunts the pages of 3 the text, much as the plotlines of Mitchell’s novels are haunted by uncanny encounters, virtual personalities, return appearances, supernatural entities, and even the spirit of David Mitchell himself. With this framework in mind, I aim to show in my study how Mitchell’s writing tracks the vagaries of reading processes, presenting narratives through which the intangible subjectivity of an individual (writer, protagonist-narrator, reader) is constantly being (re)negotiated. In so doing, I focus on three specific novels – what I would call the inaugural trio consisting of ghostwritten, number9dream, and Cloud Atlas – insofar as they could be seen to lay the groundwork for the ever-expanding, endlessly shifting fictional world of what Mitchell himself thinks of as his “über-novel” (Huff Post Books, 9 June 2015). My discussion will be situated within the framework of some of the existing critique on Mitchell’s novels, with particular attention to the bearing that his first three books may have on some theories regarding the reading and interpretation of literary works in general. So, while my discussion will deal with narrative structure and narrative perspective – aspects of Mitchell’s novels that have been covered fairly comprehensively – close attention will be paid to certain, possibly less familiar aspects of narrativity, namely the uncanny, intertextuality, and singularity. I will use these three schemes, respectively, in my reading of the three inaugural novels to demonstrate that Mitchell’s narrative innovations revoke our persistent compulsion to identify ‘the’ reader, but without doing away with the person doing the reading. In short, I aim to show how Mitchell’s writing invites what Valentine Cunningham calls “tactful” readings that would secure “the presence, the rights, the needs of the human subject” (2002: 143).

1.2. Readings of Mitchell’s inaugural trio A steadily growing interest in his writings led, in 2004, to an international conference on Mitchell’s works that resulted in the publication of a collection of Critical Essays (2011), edited by Sarah Dillon. These essays focus mostly on Mitchell’s first three novels, and cover an array of topics that range from his use of postmodern narrative forms and the format of the bildungsroman, to the issues of discursive identity, the construction of national identity, the utopian, science fiction, and postcolonialism. A number of readings presented in this compilation has bearing on my project: for example, Dillon herself provides an overview of Mitchell’s “house of fiction” (2011: 6) which is pertinent to my study when it finds that, “[w]hile Mitchell 4 might repeatedly indulge the self-referentiality characteristic of post-modern fiction, this self-referentiality is in fact always about the fertility, power and sustenance of fiction, not its exhaustion” (18). I aim to show, in my discussion on ghostwritten in Chapter 2, how that novel’s narrative structure unceasingly generates readings and re-readings to contribute to such a “sustenance of fiction”. In line with Dillon’s argument is the view adopted by Peter Childs and James Green, and also pertaining to my deconstructive treatment of his first three novels, that Mitchell’s frequent use of a nine-part format allows these texts to evade both the empty promise of autonomy for each individual part, and the threat of erasing the singularity of each by their subsumption in an equally illusive totality. Thus, argue these writers, “Mitchell’s fiction offers an understanding of being as an artistic endeavour, the inscription of the self framed as a unique performance from which uniquely singular meaning emerges” (in Dillon 2011: 42). In Chapter 4, my reading of Cloud Atlas in particular elaborates on the matter of singularity, especially as it relates to Jacques Derrida’s description of the archive. Kathryn Simpson’s discussion of number9dream is also of interest here: focusing on the postmodern dismantling of either/or dialectics in Mitchell’s work, she demonstrates that this text “questions the viability of the conventional coming-of-age quest for self-knowledge and a secure sense of identity in a postmodern, late-capitalist context even as it simultaneously tantalizes the reader with this possibility” (in Dillon 2011: 51). Taking a slightly different tack, I seek to demonstrate in Chapter 3 how number9dream, in foregrounding the effect of intertextuality on the ever-changing subjectivity of a protagonist-narrator, also draws attention to the erratic subject formation of a reader. The question of identity formation is of equal significance in Courtney Hopf’s reading of Cloud Atlas, where she considers the extent to which that novel’s use of “remediation – the representation of one medium within another – [is also] a remediation of the reading subject” (in Dillon 2004: 107).3 Further analyses that are of relevance to this thesis are found in Patrick O’Donnell’s full-length study entitled A Temporary Future: The Fiction of David Mitchell (2015). According to the author, this study “considers [Mitchell’s] canon thus far within the contexts of form and genre, the placement of his writing within the

3 Other recent critique, which is not directly pertinent to my project, includes considerations of the apocalyptic and historicism in Mitchell’s work (Hicks, 2010), and of the evolution of a cosmopolitan imagination (Schoene, 2010). 5 frameworks of the postmillennial novel, his engagement with the cosmopolitan, metamodernism, and the many worlds interpretation, and above all Mitchell’s intensive interest in temporality and the construction of the future in its relation to a human past replete with cultural and political violence” (vi). The first three chapters of O’Donnell’s work engage with certain ideas that also inform my reading of Mitchell’s inaugural trio: in “A Company of Strangers: ghostwritten”, for example, O’Donnell refers to Jacques Derrida’s description of “hauntology” to show how the non-corporeal intelligence in this debut novel “serves [amongst others] as a metaphor for the comprehension of human identity as inhabited by a ghostly alterity that incorporates the histories of others and that manifests the linkage between the one and the many” (2015: 45). Thus, argues O’Donnell, “Mitchell plots contingency in a way that both proliferates and forecloses possible outcomes,” which results in a multiplicity that “only offers the kind of radical tenuousness that subtends a future entirely dependent on the uneven mixture of chance and circumstance” (46). Along the same trajectory, I argue in Chapter 2 that this both/and logic – the logic of coincidence, or “chance and circumstance” – is a prominent structural imperative in ghostwritten because it offers both the cause and the consequence of the uncanny. Indeed, this kind of logic becomes a motif in all of Mitchell’s novels: in the second and third of the inaugural trio, it stands in service of, respectively, intertextuality and singularity. O’Donnell’s provocative reading of number9dream, in the chapter entitled “City Life: Number9Dream”, raises issues that are of specific note in my study. He sees this novel as “a failed or fractured bildungsroman,” a piece of “metafiction” that “becomes a broader inquiry about narrative as a means of piecing together fragments of story transmitted across time, space, and multiple worlds” (65). Hence the “metafictional gestures” of the text are perhaps most palpable in their “blurring the dividing line between […] the author, reader, and protagonist” (64). As I seek to demonstrate in my reading of number9dream in Chapter 3, such ambiguation springs from the unceasing intertextual operations of the text; this process paves the way for imagining a composite reader – one who is also, fleetingly, a single entity always bearing traces of the other(s) – that both resists and assents to the paradox through which it (s/he) is defined. Thus the fractured nature of this bildungsroman perceived by O’Donnell is reflected in the erratic identity formation of the subject.

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In his third chapter, “Time Travels: Cloud Atlas”, O’Donnell offers a broad- ranging discussion of Mitchell’s third novel, including a comprehensive list of the book’s intertextual references to, amongst others, Plato, Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Borges, Durell, and Tolkien (71). In addition hereto, as O’Donnell points out, the recursive narrative structuring of Cloud Atlas follows, in innovative ways, that of texts such as Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler4 (1982), A.S. Byatt’s Possession (1991), going as far back as Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) (74). It is a structure that serves to trace “the degree to which Cloud Atlas explores the movements of time past, passing and to come as they reveal the liminal conditions of identity in history” (95). Citing Mary Anne Doane’s description of cinematic modernity, O’Donnell discerns in this novel “the specter of loss…the complete obliteration of the passing moment” which is recuperated when the text opens out “onto the future of its reception – a future that will emerge with each new reading of the novel” (98). In Chapter 4 of my study, I take up the idea of the-future-to-come, as articulated by Jacques Derrida, to illustrate how Cloud Atlas resembles an archival enterprise which reflects that of the literary archive. I contend that, by dint of archivization, a reader herself becomes the archive and its endless iterations, a turbulent site where remembering and expressions of remembering ceaselessly coincide in the processes of reading. As is evident from the discoursal orientation provided above, the main concern of my study centres on readers and acts of reading. In particular, I seek to demonstrate how the identity of a reader is, to paraphrase Patrick O’Donnell, “never one thing, but an embodied contestation of singularity and multiplicity” (2015: 84). In this endeavour, I share Rita Felski’s view that reading involves “modes of engagement” between text and reader that interleave with readers’ “histories of self- formation and transformation” (2008: 21). In other words, I focus on the ongoing processes through which the subject comes into view so as to present a certain identity that, in passing, immediately dissolves in, and is dissolved by, “its movement through time and space” (O’Donnell 2015: 70).

4 O’Donnell remarks on Mitchell himself acknowledging his indebtedness to Calvino as, together with Jorge Luis Borges, an “inventor” of postmodern fiction (2005: 76). 7

1.3. The subject of/in some theories of reading and interpretation Conceptualizations of any reading process involve descriptions of an infinitely complex operation that concerns the convergence of a multitude of contextual and situational components. Such formulations address, and give rise to, a vast array of questions regarding the interaction between author, text, and reader, and the role of each in the procedures of making meaning. James L. Machor neatly summarizes the byzantine theoretical spectrum that deals with the reading and interpretation of literary texts: at the one end we have the positivistic, or essentialist, argument that “texts have inherent features that contribute to meaning and play a part in shaping the reading experience”; at the other is the negative, or idealist, view that “readers [are] totally in charge of constructing texts through the act of interpretation”, with any number of positions in between (1998: 1127). In the wake of all of these theories, argues Jonathan Culler, we come to realize that any particular theory of reading does not, and cannot, coincide with its praxis or, for that matter, with the theoretical reader it posits. This disjuncture suggests that any account of “reading is divided and heterogeneous, useful as a point of reference only when composed into a story, when construed or constructed as a narrative” (2008: 69). Culler’s comment reflects on the “different stories of reading” put forth by theorists such as Wolfgang Iser, Michel Riffaterre, Wayne Booth, Norman Holland, Stanley Fish, and others, some of whose views will be discussed further on. Upon reflection, though, it becomes evident that his observation may well be applied to the works of David Mitchell: it could be argued that Mitchell’s novels each offer a “story of reading”, every one different from the other, and each positing an ever-changing subjectivity for ‘the’ reader that is not only depicted in the single text, but drawn throughout all of his novels. One might even say that, in continually shifting the narrative perspective – which in turn challenges fixed ideas about the place and the identity of the writer, the protagonist-narrator, and the reader – these texts seem to enact the various stages of negotiation between the essentialist and the idealist views of reading. The large assortment of seemingly disparate views, or “stories”, about reading and interpreting literary texts has been subsumed, since the 1960’s and 70’s, under the term “reader-response criticism”. This assemblage is generally understood to have developed counter to the reading practices of the New Criticism, first mooted by I. A. Richards in 1926, and becoming prominent during the 1940’s and 50’s in the works of scholars such as John Crowe Ransom (1941), William 8

Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley (1946), Rene Wellek and Austin Warren (1949). The main thrust of the new critical approach to literary works promotes the idea of the text as exclusive source of meaning, and was a reaction to the so-called Old Criticism that saw meaning in literary works to derive extraneously, from literary history and biography, and impressionistic as well as didactic criticism. Reader response criticism in its turn then moves beyond these parameters, comprising in its many forms attempts to account for the continuing (and constantly changing) mental operations and responses of readers, in the process of reading.5 The complex record of reader response theory requires careful navigation, like that provided – perhaps, by necessity, somewhat formulaically – by Richard Beach (1993). In his overview of the corpus, Beach proposes five types of theorists: the experiential, focusing on the reader’s experience of the text; the social, attending to readers’ perceptions of social roles; the cultural, accounting for readers’ cultural attitudes; the psychological, concentrating on readers’ subconscious processes; and the textual, addressing readers’ knowledge of textual conventions (17). The upshot of categorizing the various theories in this way is to underline that, whatever the tendency of the individual theorist, they all hone in on the subjectivity – that is, the internal reality – of readers, which results in ‘the’ reader being construed in a number of different ways. Walker Gibson (1950), for example, conceives of a “mock reader” who is “an artifact, controlled, simplified, abstracted out of the chaos of day- to-day sensation” (266). Wayne Booth (1961) coins the phrase “implied reader” to describe an entity that is a projection of the “implied author” (74); this reader, as Wolf Schmid points out, “belongs exclusively to the sphere of the real author, in whose imagination he or she exists” (2013: para 2). Michael Riffaterre (1971) then conceives of a “super reader” whose interpretative operations seem to be largely shaped by the text, as, to his “considerable advantage”, he placidly follows “the normal process of reading” (327). Umberto Eco takes up Riffaterre’s point from a more pronounced structuralist perspective, offering a highly complex framework in which he sees the “model reader” as having a vital role in interpreting meaning through extrapolation and deductive reasoning; despite such a level of involvement, though, the model reader loses autonomy when she is foreseen by the author, and

5 For want of space, my thesis does not go into detail on other avenues explored in theories of reading of late, such as studies of the cognitive dimension of the process, dealt with mainly in Psycholinguistics; the impact of computing practices on reading strategies, which is the concern of the Digital Humanities; and the reading practices of vernacular communities (such as book-clubs, for example). 9 subsequently (or even consequently) created by the text (1979: 7). Meanwhile Jonathan Culler (1975) develops his structuralist poetics, which sees the reader making “sense” of the text through “literary competence” (105); this competent reader has certain expectations of the text, based on internalized knowledge, and is able to interpret the complexities of the piece in accordance with the extent to which these expectations are met. Stanley Fish (1980) draws on Culler’s idea of literary competence, depicting “an informed reader” who is part of a specific interpretative community, and whose competence extends to both the spoken and the semantic demands of the language in which the text is written. Christine Brooke-Rose (1981) views the reader in much the same way: the reading subject functions as an element of the text, becoming an “encoded reader” who elicits the active involvement of the actual reader (127). In amongst all of these descriptions of reading and the reader, and perhaps most pertinent to the areas of uncanniness, intertextuality, and singularity that I highlight in this study, is the phenomenological approach developed by Wolfgang Iser. In line with the theorists mentioned above, Iser foregrounds the role that an individual’s subjectivity plays in reading processes, arguing that “in considering a literary work, one must take into account not only the actual text but also, and in equal measure, the actions involved in responding to that text” (1974: 274). Iser is clear in distinguishing between the “work” and the “text”, emphasising the function of the reader in actualizing this distinction. Thus the text is seen as an inert object (that is, the writing on the page) that “only takes on life when it is realized”6 as a literary work (a novel, poem, play, or short story) in the mind of the reader (274). Nevertheless, says Iser, the literary work “cannot be identical with the text or with the [reader’s] concretization [of it], but must be situated somewhere between the two […] it cannot be reduced to [either]7 the reality of the text or to the subjectivity of the reader” (274). This means that the literary work consists of more than the sum of its

6 In the context of Iser’s broader argument, where he conceives of the two poles of a literary work in terms of the artistic (associated with the writer-creator) and the aesthetic (linked to a reader’s awareness), “realize” can be taken to mean “becoming aware of” (to register, perceive, discern), as well as “cause to happen” (to fulfil, actualize, effect). The first more obviously solicits involvement from the reader, while the second more clearly enlists aid from the text. 7 The impulse to insert here, in a poststructuralist gesture, the correlative conjunction “either”, gives the opportunity to take this statement one step further, to claim that the literary work is reduced to both the reality of the text and the subjectivity of the reader, which is more or less what Roland Barthes argues when he reverses Iser’s distinction between “work” and “text”. 10 textual and exegetic parts, making room for individual, singular, readings while, importantly, also superseding waywardly eccentric interpretations. Iser refers to the “gestalt” of the text, the perceptual structure of the literary work that a reader devises on the strength of textual cues. This structure contains as many gaps as it does concrete elements, if not more; the gaps offer “virtual dimensions” in which a reader is allowed to “picture” the reality proposed in the written work (279-283). ‘Picturing’ demands that a reader create an image of the text based on the “active interweaving of anticipation and retrospection, which on a second reading may turn into a kind of advance retrospection” (1974: 282). In short, a reader sees certain prospects in a written work based on what she already knows from experience – similar to the “horizons of expectations” mooted by Iser’s colleague in the Constance School of reception aesthetics, Hans Robert Jauss – which need to be, in looking back, constantly adjusted; with every adjustment a reader gains further thematic insight, contextually as well as intertextually, potentially ad infinitum. A reader’s engagement with the virtual dimensions of the text comes to be known as “imaging”, an activity that, perhaps surprisingly, “depends upon the absence of that which appears in the image” (1978: 137 – my italics). Indeed, Iser had previously observed that an image “is staged as the appearance of something that cannot become present” (1974: 298 – my italics), so that imaging requires a considerable degree of creativity on the part of a reader. Here Iser introduces his own interpretation of the “implied reader”, positing a figure whose “expression of the role offered by the text is in no way an abstraction derived from a real reader, but is rather the conditioning force behind a particular kind of tension produced by the real reader when he accepts the role” (1978: 36). An interesting possibility arises from this transaction between text and reader, one that is perhaps not fully accounted for in Iser’s framework. It becomes possible to say that, in accepting a readerly8 “role”, the “real” reader simultaneously accepts that she is a construct (despite Iser’s assurance that she is not an “abstraction”), not only figured – in a relationship that perpetuates a “particular kind of tension” – as ‘a reader’ in the text, or in the minds of the author and other readers, but also in her own perception. I would argue, in other

8 I use this term here in its simplest form, for now unencumbered (as far as possible) by Roland Barthes’s formulation – which will be discussed in more detail further on – of the “readerly text” that styles the reader as the receiver of a fixed, pre-determined, reading. This being said, the term nevertheless already points to a possible weakness in Iser’s conceptualization of the implied reader. 11 words, that acts of reading and interpretation would have to include a reader’s “imaging” of herself, as reader, one in possession of qualities that become apparent only through her being absent from both her own reality and the reality of the text. In a way, this calls for a reader to relinquish her subjectivity – the specific ways in which she is aware of herself and the world around her – in order to achieve a heightened, and perhaps less subjective, level of subjectivity9. In short, and to paraphrase Iser – we could refer here to the “gestalt” of a reader, which offers virtual dimensions, or gaps, in which she can picture herself as various subjects that may include the writer and the protagonist-narrator. The term ‘gestalt’ becomes even more tantalizing when we consider that its translation from the German is “shape”, or “form”, or – in literature – “character”, in that the reader allows herself to take on a specific, albeit temporary character. So, while New Critical ideas of what constitutes a reader all seem to rely to some degree or another on a fixed subjectivity, Iser paves the way for a more multifarious entity, which allows scholars to reconfigure the conventional understanding of reading processes. Roland Barthes, for example, also sees a reader to be a composite entity. He views the relationship between text and work to be the exact opposite of Iser’s description: “the work” is the impassive object that “closes on the signified,” while “the Text, on the contrary, practises the infinite postponement of the signified […] a serial movement of dislocations, overlappings, variations” (1986 [1971]: 58-9). For Barthes, this distinction is especially evident in a specific kind of experimental writing – what would perhaps come to be called postmodern literature. Such writing uses various self-conscious techniques that frustrate a reader’s expectations and decentre her responses, thereby undermining her compulsion to respond to a text as though she herself is a coherent entity. Barthes thus argues that a reader "rewrites" a text with reference to her intertextual knowledge, leading to the realization that the "I," a reader herself, comprises myriad textual connections. As a result, it becomes highly problematic to speak about “the” reader, as the identity formation of any reader is subject to the countless competing discourses that surround her.

9 My interpretation here, while taking into account the much debated paradox of Iser’s Aesthetic Response Theory, of readers who create meaning in a text that perversely limits meaning, simultaneously makes way for later post-structuralist thought that such a paradox, rather than inhibiting reader response, is precisely what encourages greater involvement on the part of the reader. 12

1.4. Subjectivity, identity, and narrative The ‘modern’ understanding of identity is, for the most part, one that springs from what Stephen Greenblatt sees as a “Renaissance self-fashioning” in which, during the sixteenth century, “there appears to be an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process” (1980: 2). The idea of “the self” per se – the self-conscious individual as coherent subject – was inaugurated in the first half of the seventeenth century by the Cartesian cogito, which posits subjectivity as a relatively straightforward coincidence of thought and being, according to which the individual can master the world around it. Subsequently, however, such sovereign ease was shown by a range of thinkers, from the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Sigmund Freud to Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, to be plagued by a vastly complicated, subtle, and volatile interplay of social imperatives and individual drives. Foucault, for instance, argues that there are “two meanings to the word subject...The subject subjugated to the other through control and dependence and the subject attached to its own identity through consciousness or self-knowledge. In both cases the word suggests a form of power that subjugates and subdues” (1983: 212). In other words, observes Donald E. Hall when discussing Judith Butler’s view, in “Gender Trouble” (1999), on subjectivity, “[w]e are subject to discourse, not simply subjects through discourse with the ability to turn around, contemplate, and rework our subjectivity at will” (Hall, 2004: 125). William Pawlett, in his reference to Jean Baudrillard’s view on the self and the other, concurs, commenting that “[w]e are constituted as subjects, as subjects of the system and also as subject to ourselves through the notion of identity” (2007: 158). Indeed, Baudrillard himself had earlier remarked that, in postmodern times, “the status of the individual is a move from an individual principle based [albeit perhaps falsely] on autonomy, character, the inherent value of the self to a principle of perpetual recycling […] which traverses each individual in his signified relation to others” (1998: 170). Hence he conceives of “le Même” – the same – to describe the postmodern idea of the simulacrum, where the ‘original’ can no longer be distinguished from its flawlessly reproduced, yet empty, copy. At this point of perpetual recycling the subject per se starts to lose definition, so that, in Jonathan Culler’s words, it “is ‘dissolved’ as its functions are taken up by a variety of interpersonal systems that operate through it” (1975: 28). 13

The dissolution of the subject in the everyday has important implications for the character of the literary subject. In this regard, Donald Hall remarks that "[f]or much of human history, these [concerns of self and subjectivity] were religious, philosophical, and political questions, but hardly constituted the driving impulse behind critical examinations of novels, poetry, plays, and other forms of aesthetic representation" (2004: 4). For his part, Michel Zink proposes that literary subjectivity comes to the fore in the marking of “the text as the point of view of a consciousness. In this sense, literary subjectivity defines literature […] as the product of a particular consciousness, hesitating between arbitrary individual subjectivity and the constraints of language’s forms” (1999: 4). In the moment of hesitation subjectivity becomes, with reference to Hall’s argument, the “tension between choice and illusion” (2004: 2); one could say that this choice also engages, as demonstrated by Roland Barthes in his 1971 theory of the text, “the textuality of the self as a system of representations” (5). The subject’s specific self-awareness, of itself as constituted in discourse, could be said to involve both writer and reader as arbitrary individual subjects whose points of view, I would argue, find expression in, and frequently coincide with the construction of a variety of protagonists, simultaneously – implicit here is also the idea of several instantaneous constructions of a single protagonist. In short, this means that a writer’s visualisation of the main character, who may at times be a narrator, or even a reader, is based on a conglomeration of identities that are ‘real’, yet not, in the same way that any subject and its subjectivity is a conglomeration of experiential contexts which never quite match the reality of experience. Thus a protagonist-narrator is, similar to Barthes’s description of a reader, “the very space in which are inscribed, without any being lost, all the citations that writing consists of” (1967: 6). In other words, in a move that is not a mirroring but an iteration, a protagonist-narrator displaces the reader even while already poised to be ousted by that reader, or another reader, who is possibly the writer, or another writer, or other narrators and protagonists, all of them merely vagabonds on the criss-cross pathways of language. In this way the identities of writer, protagonist-narrator, and reader are continually being interchanged, each time as a space where “all the citations” are variously nuanced. Such a context of persistently shifting identities is remarkably similar to certain aspects of Gérard Genette’s (1980) structuralist narratology. Genette 14 proposes a highly complex framework of narrative that, in short, comprises narration, discourse, and story; these three levels are analogous to three relational categories, classified as voice, tense, and mode. An additional dimension is added to this structure when Genette discerns three levels of diegesis,10 or storytelling: the extradiegetic level, which exceeds the main story and its universe to include the observations of a heterodiegetic narrator; the diegetic or intradiegetic level that contains the main plot, and chiefly centres on characters and their actions; and the meta- or hypodiegetic level comprising stories within the main plot, in which an intradiegetic (or homodiegetic) narrator is also a character in her own story. (When she is the main character, this becomes an autodiegetic narration). The narrative perspective at these levels correlates, broadly speaking, with the conventional understanding of third-person (extradiegetic) and first-person (intradiegetic) narration, with embedded first-person perspective expressed metadiegetically. Genette’s narrative model is of use here insofar as it suggests – albeit more clearly so on intra- and metadiegetic levels – a constant circulation of agency amongst writer, protagonist-narrator, and reader. As such, it may be fitting for Monika Fludernik to propose that “[by] transferring her deictic centre to the coordinates of another's mentality, the reader indirectly participates in the fictional process and recuperates or re-cognizes characters' experientiality in a vicarious manner” (2005: 279). One could possibly view the writing process to progress along similarly vicarious lines, where a writer devises a protagonist by also transferring “her deictic centre to the coordinates of another’s mentality”. By this logic, the “coordinates” of a protagonist-narrator offer the context for a virtual meeting of the minds between writer and reader. This convergence is nevertheless not an exact correlation – thus a gap occurs in which agency is conferred, momentarily, onto the protagonist-narrator when s/he appears to take charge of the story. However, this story is not ‘the’ only story; it is always preceded, and followed (here also meaning ‘pursued’ and ‘shadowed’) by the writer’s story. At the same time, the protagonist- narrator’s account anticipates (and is haunted by) a specific reader, but the reading experience itself forever exceeds the diegetic bounds that are already in place. In this way, a reader’s “recuperation” of the protagonist-narrator’s “experientiality” – which is also a writer’s frame of reference – involves her restructuring a writer’s story

10 The idea of diegetic levels may also refer to generic levels, as is suggested in Courtney Hopf’s reading of Cloud Atlas (in Dillon 2011: 110). 15 according to her own experience of it, including her undergoing the experiences of the protagonist-narrator. In effect, then, a reader becomes the silent narrator of the story of her own reading. (Notably, Nicholas Royle (2003: 107) explains silence as a miscommunication, where the voice of the self/Self is audible only in the head of the unpresent other/Other.) This is a form of autodiegetic narration that changes with each telling, while also, repeatedly yet imperceptibly, changing those of a writer’s and a protagonist-narrator’s. Therefore ‘the’ story keeps developing through a mute intertextual exchange between writers, protagonist-narrators, and readers, in the process also always becoming dumbly unfamiliar. The momentary misrecognition of the story then creates an uncanny space in which the singularity of each story, and of each of the participants in the play of story-making, is maintained. In other words, as I argue in my study, these three elements – the uncanny, intertextuality, and singularity – are integral to the structuring of narrative, and are particularly marked in the three novels under discussion here.

1.5. The uncanny Sigmund Freud, in his essay “Das Unheimliche” (1919), offers an elaborate contemplation on the concept of “the uncanny”. Freud sought, within the arena of aesthetics, “to distinguish as ‘uncanny’ certain things which lie within the field of what is frightening” (in Leitch 2010: 825). In so doing, he makes use of German psychologist Ernst Jentsch’s observations on the uncanny, with Jentsch proposing “intellectual uncertainty” to be “the essential factor in the production of the feeling of uncanniness” (826). Finding this definition to be somehow lacking, Freud embarks on a formalistic deliberation of the relationship between the opposing terms heimlich and unheimlich. He observes that “the word ‘heimlich’ is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which, without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight” (827). As a result, and in an oddly paradoxical slippage of meaning, the latter description begins to resemble definitions of ‘unheimlich’, particularly the one proposed by Friedrich von Schelling of unheimlich11 as that which “ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light” (828), something, concludes Freud, “which is secretly familiar, which

11 The term heimlich can also be understood in the sense of ‘secretly’, so that unheimlich then alludes to something secret being unveiled. 16 has undergone repression and then returned from it” (836). Interestingly, Freud distinguishes between “the uncanny that we actually experience and the uncanny that we merely picture or read about” (837). This differentiation allows for the fact that, in literature, “the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced” (835), a kind of gradual eradication of definitive boundaries that is effected in large part, as I will show in Chapter 2, by the narrative structure of a particular text. The role of the uncanny in narrative is a prominent part of the narratology conceived of by Tzvetan Todorov, where he discerns a link between the estrangement effected by the uncanny and what he calls “hesitation” (1975: 24). In his assessment of the fantastic in literature, Todorov makes use of Russian formalist Vladimir Propp’s work in Morphology of the Folk Tale (1928, first translated into English 1958) to propose a poetics of the fantastic that comprise a spectrum along which various forms of fantastical narratives are situated. These forms range from “the uncanny” at one end, through “the fantastic-uncanny” and “the fantastic- marvelous”, to the purely “marvelous” at the other end (24). Todorov goes on to argue that, in literature of the fantastic (which, incidentally, is not necessarily genre- bound), we are often confronted with

a world which is indeed our world, the one we know [in which] there occurs an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this same familiar world. The person who experiences the event must opt for one of two possible solutions: either he is the victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of the imagination – and the laws of the world then remain what they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality – but then this reality is controlled by laws unknown to us (25).

Therefore, as Todorov later explains, “the text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural or supernatural explanation of the events described” (33 – my emphasis): in the uncanny, I would argue, this hesitation persists, and the ambiguity is never resolved. As such, propose Pieter Borghart and Christophe Madelein in their discussion of Todorov’s poetics, “we are dealing with an ambiguous vision” that translates into a “rhetoric of doubt” (2003: np). In the register of the uncanny, this doubt is forever expressed, in Todorov’s words, in terms of a “familiar” reality “controlled by laws unknown to us”. In this way, the uncanny denotes the unnerving strangeness of the decontextualized familiar, at the same time as it conveys the uncomfortable familiarity of the not-known. It is an ambiguity whose shadow also

17 restlessly keeps stirring in the uncertain space – the space of narrative, as I argue in Chapter 2 – that opens up between the paradigmatic fabula and a syntagmatic syuzhet. In this I concur with Robin Lydenberg, that such irresolvable ambiguity suggests “that perhaps the most essential quality of narrative is uncanniness” (1997: 1073). More recently, Nicholas Royle (2003) offered his deliberation on the uncanny, where he provides a comprehensive, and complex, description of the emergence of the uncanny, together with a number of close readings of Freud’s essay. Royle’s reading of Todorov’s narratology is specifically relevant here. He observes that Todorov seems uncertain about the place of the uncanny in literature, about whether it is a literary genre or not, which leads the latter to propose the idea of the ‘meta- uncanny’. However, says Royle, the “uncanny is always meta-uncanny”, even while there can be no meta-uncanny insofar as “we can never fix the place or borders where the uncanny ends and the putatively ‘meta-‘discourse begins” (18-19). Hence for Royle the uncanny “is not a literary genre. But nor is it a non-literary genre. It overflows the very institution of literature. It inhabits, haunts, parasitizes the allegedly non-literary. It makes ‘genre’ blink” (19). Genre “blinks”, I would argue, when the uncanny unveils its attempts to empty out the signifier, to staunch the overflow of signification in order to naturalize that which, especially in narrative, is not natural. Royle avers that “above all, perhaps, […] the uncanny is a reading- effect” (44). This would imply that institutionalized efforts at naturalizing narrative idiosyncrasies are ceaselessly countered by reading, including reading as writing and narrating; narrating as writing and reading; and writing as narrating and reading; but also reading as reading and writing as writing and narrating as narrating – in other words, all of the infinite permutations of textuality that narrative suggests. All of these versions of reading work to discover, and lay bare, the way in which narrative is singular – in Derridean terms, how it is always a novel, original, event within the uniformity of genre. Moreover, it also becomes clear how all of these versions of reading give rise to, even while making use of, the processes of intertextuality through the whole spectrum of their uncountable formulations.

1.6. Intertextuality The term “intertextuality” was introduced by Julia Kristeva in “Word, Dialogue, and Novel”, first published in Critique in 1967. Focusing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s work 18 on dialogics, Kristeva develops a comprehensive view of the interrelations of poetic language, famously observing that “[any] text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations: any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least double‟ (Kristeva 1967: 66). In “The Bounded Text”, her more abstract description of the text as “a permutation of texts” (1968: 36) displaces the metaphor of the mosaic, while in Revolution in Poetic Language, the idea of intertextuality is extended to include “[the] transposition of one sign system into another‟ (1974: 59- 60). Importantly, this evolution in Kristeva’s thinking allows for the realization that the intertextual character of reading changes our understanding of both primary texts and their derivatives, an aspect that becomes, as I will show in my analysis of number9dream in Chapter 3, instrumental when considering the make-up of readers. Kristeva’s insights regarding intertextuality – which she later deploys in her ground-breaking work on gender – are duly taken up by a number of theorists, to offer, as Juliana de Nooy suggests, “a story of the intertextuality of intertextuality” (1998: 271). For example, in his apogeic work, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1982), Gérard Genette conceives of a global scheme of “transtextuality” that incorporates intertextuality as one of five subcategories (the other four being paratextuality, metatextuality, hypertextuality, and architextuality). This kind of “textual transcendence”, which includes elements of imitation, transformation, and generic classification, rests on Genette’s claim that transtextuality is “all that [which] sets the text in relationship, whether obvious or concealed with other texts” (1992: 83-84). Such a methodological approach to textual interrelations is especially convenient when analysing the concrete elements of textuality; of added significance to my study is its more abstract image of the palimpsest, which articulates what Carmen Lara-Rallo discerns as a “presence-in- absence” that “makes it possible to discover a connection between intertextuality and the critical discourse of spectrality” (2009: 92). I develop this idea in Chapter 3, in my reading of number9dream as a bildungsroman, with reference to Sarah Dillon’s findings on the palimpsest and spectralization in my bid to illustrate how such a connection opens up a space in which a reader is constantly coming into being.

19

The link between spectres and texts – especially the writing of texts – is one that also intrigues Harold Bloom. In his Anxiety of Influence (1975), Bloom’s main concern is to offer guidance to young “poets”, whose creativity must account for the often debilitating authority of their predecessors. In effect, as Juliana de Nooy observes, Bloom suggests that literary texts are produced and constantly reproduced through the writer’s “Oedipal struggle” with her precursor (1998: 271). Bloom proposes that innovative and significant writing springs from a creative “misprision” – proceeding through six stages, all bearing Greek names – of the influential writers of the past. Of interest here is the sixth and final stage, referred to as apophrades, or “the return of the dead”. Having gone through the process of a misreading of and turning away from a predecessor’s work, the new writer moves on to partaking of the predecessor’s creative resources and eventually attain creative independence; now the precursor’s work must be allowed to live again through engaging with it in the new writing. In some notable instances, the older writer’s work even ends up being influenced by the younger’s, provoking, as Bloom himself remarks many years later, “the uncanny recognition that one is never fully the author of one's work or one's self” (2011: np). Taking into account the idea mooted earlier, of the continual circulation of agency, it becomes possible to see how this “uncanny recognition” also applies to a protagonist-narrator and a reader, which necessarily comes from a strange misrecognition. In a sense, then, Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” becomes in the subject, as I show in Chapter 2, what could be called the anxiety of interpretation, that she (variously in the semblance of writer, narrator- protagonist, reader) may not have understood the meaning of the text correctly; this disquiet is precisely what induces the constant move between the different diegetic functions. A similar understanding of the uncanny is evident in the work of Roland Barthes, Kristeva’s Tel Quel collaborator. Barthes conceives of the intertextual as strangely 'already-written' (1974: 21). For him “[a] text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. [...] the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them” (1977: 146). Barthes’s views on the uncanny relationship between text and writer were first mooted in “The Death of the Author” (1967). Here he proposes that the Author is killed off by the writers of texts, that “every text is eternally written here and now” so 20 that “the writer (scriptor) is born simultaneously with his text” (4). These observations (re)establish the place of readers in the creation of (the) Text, where “the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author” (6). Barthes suggests that, as a space where “all the citations” (6) of writing are inscribed, a reader as co-scriptor of texts, herself creates singular intertextual links. In other words, we can now see how readers experience each new text in terms of their experiences with previous texts, suggesting that, as Bennett and Royle observe, texts are “unfinished and unfinishable […] inevitably linked up with other texts [so] that there is no simple end (or beginning) to any text (2004: 284). Here we see an open-endedness that, tantalizingly, hints at a present moment, indicative of a past that cannot be fixed, and a future that can always only be other. It is a moment that embraces the tentative inevitability of an original event that was, and is, and still is to be: a single moment; a singular event – a complete (and completely unfinished) singularity.

1.7. Singularity The terms “singular” and “singularity” generally denote the uniqueness of an entity, implying that differences between entities are absolute and non-negotiable. This understanding is famously recast by Jacques Derrida in his work on différance, where he argues that singularity “is never one-off, never closed like a point or a fist. It is a mark, a mark that is differential, and different from itself; different with itself. Singularity differs from itself, it is deferred so as to be what it is and to be repeated in its very singularity” (1992: 67-8). In thus demonstrating that any one meaning attached to the sign is always endlessly differed and deferred, Derrida finds that what characterizes the sign is its iterability – the fact that it can, and must, be repeated. However, this does not mean that its meaning is repeated, precisely: the fact that the sign is always reproduced in a different spacio-temporal context ensures that it never means exactly the same as its prior self, that it is new, and unique, in each iteration. Significantly then, as Jonathan Culler points out, “[the] singularity of a work is what enables it to be repeated over and over in events that are never exactly the same” (2005: 871). Moreover, in the double gesture that always marks the iterability of the sign, it is “a singularity that challenges the generality of truth that it nevertheless makes possible” (872). For Derrida, singularity is intimately involved with intertextuality, insofar as the former describes “a text which, in the face of the event of another’s text, tries to 21

‘respond’ or to ‘countersign’” (in Culler 2005: 871). He finds that the iterability of the sign enables us to see each singularity as a temporal event, in other words, to realize that singularity also relates to the intertextuality of past, present, and future. Hence Derrida proposes that “[in] the living present, the notion of which is at once the most simple and most difficult of notions, all temporal alterity can be constituted and appear as such: as other past present, other future present, other absolute origins relived in intentional modification, in the unity and actuality of my living present” (1978: 165). Nonetheless, “[what] is to come is not a future present, yesterday is not a past present” (378). Later, in a more subtle rendering of this idea, Derrida argues that “[from] the moment time is apprehended on the basis of the present now as a general form and only modifiable or modalizable in such a way that the past and future are still presents-past and presents-to-come, this predetermination [of the temporality] entails the aporetics of time that is not, of a time that is what it is without being (it), that is not what it is and that is what it is not, which is to be without being (it)” (1992: 28). In other words, the “past present” is what it never was, neither will the “future present” be what it is now: in simple terms, these modalities ‘are’ only ever what we imagined they would be, in a present that is in any case also forever beyond our full grasp. Within this context, Derrida envisages an “immemorial past” (1998: 18) and a “future-to-come” (1982: 21), both conditions that rely on the workings of memory. He argues that “[the] memory we are considering here is not essentially oriented toward the past, toward a past present deemed to have really and previously existed. Memory stays with traces, in order to ‘‘preserve’’ them, but traces of a past that has never been present, traces which always remain, as it were, to come (à venir), come from the future, from the to come (à-venir). Resurrection does not resuscitate a past which had been present; it engages the future” (1986: 58). This description of time and memory has significant bearing on my reading of Cloud Atlas in Chapter 4, where I consider how the narrative structure of that novel preserves traces from a past that is another’s past, an immemorial past, to project a future that is another’s future, the future-to-come. Within these parameters, I seek to demonstrate how the trace follows the design of the archive, of an archival enterprise that is both intertextual and uncanny. In summary, then, the analyses of David Mitchell’s inaugural trio in the next three chapters aim to illustrate how these novels not only lay the foundation for his later 22 books, but also for future discussions on readers and reading. Each of these three chapters consists of two parts, the first of which offers a discussion on the theoretical framework of the reading and an overview of the novel in question, while the second presents a close reading of its narrative structure. My objective is to show how the narrative structure of the respective texts plays on the characteristics of the uncanny, intertextuality, and singularity. While these three elements are evident in all three of these novels, I associate – in ways that are unavoidably artificial, as any such endeavour usually is – one particular framework with a particular novel. Hence I discuss, in Chapter 2, the ways in which Mitchell’s debut novel, ghostwritten, articulates the uncanniness of narrative, where the subject is perpetually recycled to generate countless readings and re-readings of both the novel and the external references on which it relies. This point leads to Chapter 3 being a consideration of the functioning of intertextuality in number9dream. Focussing on the novel as bildungsroman, I elaborate on the palimpsestic qualities of the intertextual to illustrate how these foreground the erratic subject formation of the reader as a singular entity. Then, in Chapter 4, I take up the idea of singularity to demonstrate that Cloud Atlas, in presenting a collection of fragments that apparently preserve the past, not only mimics the workings of the literary archive, but also iterates the way in which a reader in her turn operates according to archival designs. I will conclude this study by considering how the uncanny, intertextuality, and singularity are all deeply intertwined in each other, as well as in the processes through which the subject is constantly becoming – a reader, a writer, a narrator-protagonist, a text – all at the same time yet distinctly separate in time and space.

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Chapter 2 The uncanny in the narrative structure of ghostwritten ...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. Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey Epigraph to ghostwritten

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Part 1 The perpetual recycling of the subject in ghostwritten

David Mitchell’s debut novel, ghostwritten, was published in 1999 to wide acclaim: it was awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and the distinguished English novelist A.S. Byatt, for her part, declared it one of the best first novels she had read (Begley, 2010: 1). A number of scholarly pieces on the novel eventually followed: for example, in 2011 Caroline Edwards presents a discussion on how the text “constructs an explicitly foregrounded deconstruction of totalitarian utopianism” (in Dillon, 201: 180) so that its characters are able to “reveal the ‘minor’ scale at which utopian moments are possible” (185). In the same year, Nicholas Dunlop offers a reading which relies on the aesthetics of Science Fiction to demonstrate how its nine-part structure articulates, in the words of Sarah Dillon, “a persuasively subversive reading of the history and projected future of colonialism and its associated ideologies” (17). Also of note is William Stephenson’s science fictional approach to the novel, which finds the novel to be “plural, polyphonic and interconnected” so as to engage with “the plural, polyphonic and interconnected world of the globalized twenty-first century” (238). More recent, and also more pertinent to the argument I offer in my study, is Patrick O’Donnell’s analysis of the text, which shows how it “articulates a world in which the narrative weave limns the cultural and political circumstances of the human order on a planet inhabited by many orders of being and nonbeing” (2015: 34). O’Donnell draws on Jacques Derrida’s description of “hauntology” to argue that, to some extent or another, each character in the novel “serves as a metaphor for the comprehension of human identity as inhabited by a ghostly alterity that incorporates the histories of other and that manifest the linkage between the one and the many” (45). My study takes a slightly different tack, centring on the idea that the ‘histories’ offered in ghostwritten are all, each in their own way, a story about reading, continually reinvented, so as to keep averting the end of history. The various approaches to the novel arguably have much to do with its innovative structure: it is startlingly eclectic, genre-wise, making use of a broad range of narrative and stylistic techniques in its bid to, as Mitchell himself puts it, “locate meaning in randomness. It’s an essay in fiction about causality [...] Each chapter offers a different reason why its events unfold as they do” (in Begley, 2010: 25

5). In the process, we are presented with – again according to the author’s own description in the title page – “a novel in nine parts”; however, the assemblage of these parts is oddly idiosyncratic, making them seem wholly unrelated to each other. Moreover, with the exception of the penultimate one, all of the episodes are presented as first-person narratives that involve, each time, a different narrator with a different story that appears entirely divorced from both its forerunner and its successor. (To add to this impression of incoherence, we end up discovering that, in fact, this is a novel in ten parts, not nine, when the final episode reintroduces Quasar, the protagonist of episode one, as narrator.) Such structural dissociation seems to be what directs the text – that is until, to our constant bewilderment, some arbitrary yet tantalizing connections between these tales briefly keep (re)surfacing, as if creating a veneer of order. This ‘order’ of seeming coincidence is a structural imperative prominent in ghostwritten (as well as in the two novels that follow, and even beyond). To a degree, coincidence is both the cause and the consequence of the uncanny in Mitchell’s debut novel (as it is of intertextuality and singularity in number9dream and Cloud Atlas, respectively), so that ‘coincidence’ is not at all coincidental. Such an operation is initiated almost instantly when, in episode one, the cultish terrorist Quasar phones a secret number to get more money from the treasury of the cult, using the codified phrase: "the dog needs to be fed" (g: 27); then in the next episode, the narrator Satoru, an aspiring young saxophonist, is closing up the CD shop where he works when he is obliged to go back and take a call from what he assumes to be “a crank-caller” who states, to Satoru’s (and the reader’s) puzzlement, that “the dog needs to be fed” (54). This first link is followed by similarly random – and not always consecutive – ones in each episode, all the more baffling for their seeming to hint at an identifiable pattern that would explain the meaning of the novel as a whole, while actually bringing about quite the opposite. Indeed, a reader soon realizes that all attempts to assign meaning to the text by way of these connections only intensify its enigmatic quality. The ‘final’ explanation as to why “events unfold as they do” appears at an increasing remove: as the text closes more or less exactly where it began, with Quasar still wondering as he did at the very start (1) “who is blowing on the nape of [his] neck”, the concluding image is of “nothing but [a] train, accelerating into darkness” (436).

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The upshot of such a structural melange is that ghostwritten, in a move that is fairly typical of postmodern texts, precludes easy classification. Much in the same way that its narrative contains brief instances of seemingly significant coincidence, the text presents fleeting moments of correspondence to a variety of genres, from crime thriller, ghost story, and romance, to the science fictional, the fantastical, and – in a departure from the usual postmodern strategy – the realistic. By dint of conventional expectations, then, all of these genres allow a reader some passing interpretation of causality, none of which, however, provides a definitive account of meaning. A reader is eventually pressed to acknowledge that if the novel does in fact “locate meaning in randomness” it is a meaning that remains forever mutable, therefore ultimately indefinable. In other words, in offering such widely differing genre-based reasons why “events unfold as they do”, in constantly hesitating between one causal pattern or another, the text effectively denies the logic of ‘reason’, suggesting that, paradoxically, randomness itself is probably the only logical cause of events. This paradox presents a discomfiting sense of ‘natural’ causality being put aside, an uneasiness that is intensified by the arbitrary, often mysterious (re)appearance of one or the other character in another’s story. Such displacement then serves to herald the advent of the uncanny: the peculiar arrangement of the narrative, coupled with the unpredictable recurrence of the subject, points to the way in which the familiar is forever strangely decontextualized in this text. The uncanny therefore presents a dual context, inducing an ambiguity that lies at the root of the subject formation of each protagonist-narrator, as well as that of a reader (insofar as the reader is the protagonist of her own reading, as suggested in the introductory chapter). As a result the nature of the subject – be this narrator, protagonist, or reader – is forever left partly undefined; in fact, this subject becomes a rhetorical figure that persistently haunts the narrative structures of the text. An analysis of the narrative processes inaugurated by the uncanny in this novel will demonstrate the ways in which such displacement, of the literal and the rhetorical – or, if you will, of the actual subject and representations of this subject – results in a supposed ‘embodiment’ of the reader that nevertheless affirms the spectrality of her presence. As discussed in the introductory chapter, the concept of “the uncanny” was refined by Sigmund Freud in 1919, in his eponymous essay. Freud’s argument – that the outcome of the uncanny in literature is an effacement of “the distinction 27 between imagination and reality” (in Leitch 2010: 835) – points to the way in which the narrative structure of a particular text can be said to effect a gradual eradication of generic boundaries. The current use of the term ‘narrative structure’ derives from the later precepts of Russian formalist literary theory and refers, simply speaking, to the way in which a fictional account is put together (though, of course, such a process is anything but simple). Narrative structure, and structuring, involves a certain rearrangement of the linear and chronological elements of a story – including its events, its characters, and what these characters say and do – in order to fashion a particular plot. (As noted in Chapter 1, the Russian formalists refer to these two aspects of narrative respectively as fabula and syuzhet – story and plot.) An explication of the narrative structure of a text, then, aims to describe the ways in which the plot effectively violates the ‘natural’ order of events, a process that would also account for the impact of the narrative perspective on the processes of meaning-making in the text (especially, perhaps, changes in the narrative point-of- view). As I sought to demonstrate in the Introduction, Tzvetan Todorov sees narrative and meaning-making to evolve through a process of constant hesitation; hesitation is, in turn, linked to aspects of the uncanny. Todorov describes a vacillation between so-called natural and supernatural explanations for fantastical narrative scenarios, which translates into a vacillation between cause and effect that is also evident in other narrative forms, creating, across the board, a spacio- temporal ambiguity that cannot be resolved. In this spacio-temporal chaos, the characteristics of self and other are constantly being interchanged; such changeability likewise marks the violation exerted on the story by the plot, a defamiliarization visited on the paradigmatic fabula by the unruly elements of an eccentric syuzhet. This estrangement is likely what prompts Robin Lydenberg to , in her reading of Freud’s “Das Unheimliche”, that “perhaps the most essential quality of narrative is uncanniness” (1997: 1073), that unnerving decontextualisation of the familiar that accompanies the uncomfortable familiarity of the not-known. Indeed, one could go so far as to say that the furthering of any plot relies on the degree of estrangement, and thus hesitation, experienced by a reader. As Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan shows in her discussion on narrative fiction in general, readers are engaged in a “continual process of forming hypotheses” (1983: 121) regarding the development of the plot, constantly pausing to choose between one 28 proposition and another so as to engender narrative. In this way, argues Lydenberg, stories have “a generative power that is a characteristic effect of the uncanniness of narrative” (1997: 1073). To a large degree, this kind of generative force is what drives the ‘story’ (as much as there is a single story) of ghostwritten as a whole. In short, the novel is ‘about’ the manner in which the lives of nine main characters intersect in ostensibly inconsequential, yet unsettling ways: Quasar the terrorist who narrates episode one makes an unintelligible and ultimately fruitless call from Okinawa to Tokyo, unintentionally getting on the line Satoru the young saxophonist that is the narrator of episode two, who then (with girlfriend Tomoyo) briefly shares a table at a restaurant in Hong Kong with Neil Brose, the corrupt financial lawyer narrating episode three, who for his part is sleeping with his cleaning lady that is the great- granddaughter of the Chinese Tea Shack lady who narrates episode four, who in turn is inhabited for a time by the non-corpum narrating episode five that also briefly transmigrates into the body of the Mongolian KGB agent Suhbataar, who in episode six shows up in Petersburg to facilitate the sale of a painting stolen by the narrator of this episode, Margarita Latunsky, which is to be replaced by a fake reproduction created by one Jerome, who re-emerges in episode seven as the life-partner of Alfred, the subject of an autobiography being written in London by ghostwriter and narrator Marco, who is the one to save Mo Muntervary from being run down by a taxi, then for her to feature as narrator in episode eight and the creator of a defence programme that we get to know via a radio show as Zookeeper, the artificial intelligence depicted in episode nine, who is intent on forsaking the laws that oblige it to safeguard human life to allow humankind to destroy itself. (Incidentally, episode nine has no narrative voice per se, unless it is concealed in the philosophical argument of the Socratic dialogue presented in the ongoing conversation between the host of the show, Bat Segundo, and Zookeeper). As the novel progresses, then, the cross-references between episodes become increasingly pronounced, as well as labyrinthine. To name just one example: Quasar’s misdirected call to Satoru delays the latter’s departure from the CD shop, which serendipitously leads to his meeting his lady-love Tomoyo. As a result, the final episode, episode ten, seems to be teeming with a jumbled array of elements from each of the previous ones. Despite such chaos, though, it becomes clear, at the last, that the ways in which the stories traverse each other are crucial in 29 attempts to ward off the self-destruction of humanity envisaged by Zookeeper (a strategy that would maintain the standing order, however chaotic). As such, we start to recognize that the uncanny links between the various parts of the novel serve to generate story upon story, that these narratives somehow brought humankind to the brink of annihilation, but that they are also what eventually averts the apocalyptic end. This proliferation of individual stories offers a representation (or re- presentation) of lived experience that perhaps resembles what Richard Rorty calls, citing Nietzsche’s well-known aphorism, “truth as a mobile army of metaphors” (1989: 28). Truth, as has been well-established by post-structuralist writers of Rorty’s ilk, is not “out there” as a universal, immutable or “imperishable” fact (27); nor does it correspond to some actual, neutral reality. Instead truth is contingent, just another narrative, but one which decontextualizes, in the way of metaphor, the “known” so as to account for “old” things in “new” ways (29). Such retellings require the “poet” to dwell “on idiosyncrasies, on contingencies – to tell us about accidental appearance rather than essential reality” (26). In other words, literature cannot be expected to recount the whole truth of lived experience – instead, its principal function is to offer, perhaps only tentatively, an articulation of the many, often unexpected ways in which ‘truth’ is prismatically, even ephemerally, made up of countless individual stories. Rorty sees this process as a “Nietzschean overcoming”, a spacio-temporal spiral of continual self-invention where the narratives devised by the individual are aimed at evading inherited descriptions of its existence, and at finding new descriptions of its way of life (29). Consequently, he argues, the narratives that make up lived experience, rather than espousing “the will to truth”, articulate “the will to self-overcoming” so that “[t]he drama of an individual human life, or of the history of humanity as a whole, is not one in which a pre-existent goal is triumphantly reached or tragically not reached [but] a way to describe that past which the past never knew” (29). This observation is exemplified in ghostwritten by the titular character of Marco the ghostwriter, the narrator-protagonist of episode seven, who points out that he could worry “about the possible endings of the stories that had been started” only if he were a proper “writer”; he avers: “Maybe that’s why I’m a ghostwriter. The endings have nothing to do with me” (g: 279). In fact, Rorty’s views on narrative are strikingly played out in the structure of ghostwritten: the novel as a whole comprises a highly intricate interweaving of 30

“idiosyncrasies” and “accidental appearance” (cf. Rorty, 1989: 26). As such, each consecutive tale is rendered eccentric by the point-of-view of its first-person narrator, while at the same time the unforeseen and coincidental arrival on the scene of characters and signs from the other tales imposes the perspective of another, largely unwitting subject, beggaring the idea of an “essential reality”. Hence each episode (apart from the penultimate one) commences in the subjective case: “Who was blowing on the nape of my neck?” (g: 3); “Spring was late on this rainy morning, and so was I” (36); “There’s a mechanism in my alarm clock...” (67); and so on. However, from episode to episode the ‘I’ keeps changing voice (and face), in effect becoming, very briefly, another ‘I’, perhaps even an other-I, before being familiarized by the context. In episode one, for example, after some textual misdirection in which we take the narrator to be one Mr. Kobayashi, it becomes clear that the narrator-protagonist is Quasar; when the narrative continues using the subjective case in the next episode, there is a momentary confusion as to whose voice is being heard – perhaps echoing Michel Foucault when he famously asks: “who is the ‘I’ that speaks?” – before the realization sets in that we are dealing with a ’new’ protagonist, namely Satoru. In that moment of hesitation the reader finds herself astray in the realm of the uncanny, vacillating between voices; in that same moment, at the start of every episode, the ‘I’ occupies an ambiguous space, one in which it is irretrievably tacked onto the intangible shadow of the other ‘I’. This means that the ‘new’ ‘I’ is only tangentially aware of the ’old’ one – for example, Satoru ‘knows’ Quasar only as a voice in the ether who speaks an unfathomable message; Marco ‘knows’ Mo Muntervary only as “the anorak woman” (g: 274) whom he rescues, and so forth. Nevertheless, even such a tenuous awareness serves to initiate (paradoxically, in an endless cycle of reiteration) a ‘new’ description, a fresh perspective – even if apprehended only by the reader, in her guise as meta- and/or extradiegetic persona – on “that past which the past never knew” (Rorty, 1989: 29). What this means, quite simply, is that Satoru experiences, and causes us to experience, a novel view of Quasar that neither Quasar nor the reader had previously considered; this process continues throughout, so that each experiencing subject effectively is constantly reinvented by an (other) experiencing subject (which includes the reader). In this way, the (re)appearance in episode three of Satoru and Tomoyo from the previous episode – in the shape of an unspecified (in the eyes of Neal Brose, the 31 narrator-protagonist of this episode) “kid and his girl”, he with “a saxophone case, and a small backpack with airline tags still attached” (g: 77-8) – prompts a reconsideration of what “the past” ‘knew’ (or what we learnt about these characters in the previous episode). Significantly, these two could be any of a plethora of other similar couples, a possibility which draws attention to the equivocal state of their particular existence (and also to the tenuous identity of the subject). A reader’s impulse to assign them specific identities is shaped by certain overlapping contingencies (namely the saxophone and the airline tags); faced with the two propositions – that the couple is one we know, or that they are strangers – a reader chooses the familiar because of this perceived correspondence. Nevertheless, the deliberate vagueness of the description continues to undermine the certainty of this choice, and the possibility of the unfamiliar persists in the shadowy presence of that ‘other’ couple. For the remainder of the novel, then, the reader is in some ways prepared, albeit uneasily, for more such unexpected connections; this notwithstanding, she is always also caught off guard by the frequently unlikely, yet oddly appropriate, manifestation of these relations, always obliged to opt for (or familiarize) one proposition while scotching the other, somehow continually haunted by the spectre of the other . This haunting can be seen as a form of narrative proliferation: in choosing one proposition, the reader is also acknowledging the ghost of a possibility, though unrealized for now, of a multitude of other stories. The shadow-like remnant of the other, and the echo of its story, therefore endures in the background of the present subject’s individual experience, constantly reminding us of the presence of the other. In effect, then, at any moment the ‘I’ manages to be in two (or more) places at once, and the reader is compelled to take into account the twofold context that this presents. Such a doubling of perspective, so strongly reminiscent of the interplay of fabula and syuzhet, serves to “exhibit the [paradigmatic] universality and necessity of the [syntagmatic] individual and the contingent” (Rorty, 1989: 26). As such, it is the unlooked for, yet persistent presence of the familiar subject (always of a previous story, though often projected as a future incarnation) as unfamiliar other in the current story – or, as Baudrillard would have it, the preservation of otherness, the maintenance of the other (2008: 112) – that lends universal power and import to the particularized experiences of each subject. Surprisingly, the result is to subsume the story of the self under the story of the other, and vice versa, confirming Baudrillard’s description – referred to in Chapter 1 32

– of the ”perpetual recycling” (1998: 170) of the postmodern subject. Hence the perpetual recycling of the subject through all of the stories presented in ghostwritten becomes its postmodern plot: if the story of the novel is ‘about’ the intersecting lives of nine people, the plot concerns the ways in which such interconnectedness, or recycling , has the potential to cause both the destruction and the preservation of the self. Indeed, what we find here is not so much one coherent story as that which Peter Childs and James Green, in their discussion on the role of narrative in ghostwritten, describe as “an interpenetration of voices, texts, and sensations” (cf. 2011: 44). Rorty sees this kind of polyvalent narrative as an act of “de-divinization”: rather than simply exalting “reality” as “a formed, unified, present, self-contained substance, something capable of being seen steadily and whole”, such texts depict lived experience as “a tissue of contingent relations, a web which stretches backward and forward through past and future time” (Rorty, 1989: 41). This aspect of the novel is likened by Childs and Green to the workings of meronymy, an element of linguistics that refers to the semantic relation between a constituent part or parts of some object or system and the system itself. (A very simple example of this would be the way in which ’finger’ is related to ‘hand’, or ’bark’ is related to ’tree’). Meronymy differs from metonymy in that, while metonymy concerns symbolic meanings, meronymy involves literal ones – ’finger’ does not ‘stand for’ ’hand’, it stands for itself as part of ’hand’: this means that the literal is entirely distinct from the metaphoric. Nonetheless, as with metonymy, the meronym serves to describe (albeit perhaps less ambiguously) the larger system, or holonym, as much as the system serves to classify its typical component. Seen in this way, we could say that each of the stories in ghostwritten serves to define storytelling in general; in fact, each narrative presents a catalogue of the larger human tendency to narrativize. As Luisa Rey the writer says to Bat Segundo the night-time deejay in episode nine of the novel: “The human world is made up of stories, not people” (g: 386). This general inclination of people to narrativize, to translate events and phenomena into stories that comprise the cause and effect of human behaviour, is one that, according to Monika Fludernik in her study of the cognitive (or, as she terms it, ‘natural’) parameters of storytelling, is, and always has been, innate to humanity’s attempts to make sense of the world . Narrativity, argues Fludernik – the potential of events and phenomena to become a story – is constituted by what she 33 calls “experientiality, namely by the quasi-mimetic evocation of ‘real-life experience' […] Experientiality, as everything else in narrative, reflects a cognitive schema of embodiedness that relates to human existence and human concerns” (2005: 9). This suggests that the stories about our knowledge of the world, which includes aspects such as awareness, perception, reasoning, and judgement, spring from the knowledge of ourselves being in the world as physical entities: for Fludernik, “[e]mbodiment and existence in human terms are indeed the same thing” (22). In this view, the condition of embodiedness is the most basic component of experientiality “rather than specificity or individuality, because these can in fact be subsumed under [emdodiedness]” (22). What Fludernik seems to be suggesting is that the specific and the individual – what Rorty would call the idiosyncratic and the contingent – is categorized by experientiality, by living in the world; by the same token (and in the manner of meronymy), these discrete aspects serve to define the broader scheme of lived experience. In this way, Quasar’s story does not ‘stand for’ Satoru’s, nor does Satoru’s for Neal Brose’s, and so on and so on, so that the individual ‘truth’ of each story is what marks the ‘truth’ of lived experience in general. This ‘truth’ is, as Marco the ghostwriter realizes, “as relative as time: […] does chance or fate control our lives? [...] If you’re in your life, chance. Viewed from the outside, like a book you’re reading it’s fate all the way” (g: 292). In other words, in this novel the subject – narrator, protagonist, reader – is able to experience narrative both from the inside and from the outside, as both participant and onlooker, to effect what Lydenberg sees as “a structural doubling [that] adds a further uncanny effect to the narrative” (cf. 1997: 1075). As she goes on to point out, “narrative both sustains and alienates subjects inside and outside their life stories” (1083). This suggests that narrating necessitates becoming the other, the one outside one’s own story, so as to accomplish a first-person narration (‘I’ can only speak of, and for ‘myself’ as an other); it is a kind of alienation of self that paradoxically ensures the survival of the subject. On the other hand, if embodiedness is what underlies experientiality (and ultimately narrativity), we may well ask what happens to storytelling when the narrator-protagonist is time and again dis-embodied, as is the case in this novel. More precisely, what does this continual ’transmigration’ of consciousness – a motif strongly expressed in ghostwritten, particularly in episode five – suggest about the desire to narrate?

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Lydenberg notes that a number of scholars align such a desire with the uncanny, insofar as in Freudian terms it arises from the illusion of lost maternal plenitude. The impossibility of returning to the beginning, of restoring the imagined union with the mother, is compounded by the equal impossibility of realizing an ending. While narrative desire is thus denied final satisfaction, that deferral protects against the danger of coming too close to satisfaction, a proximity that threatens to shut down narrative and destroy the subject. Narrative survival depends, then, on careful navigation between extremes: the uncanniness of uncontrolled desire and fertility and the uncanniness of their annihilation […] to evade closure by spawning more stories [is to] illustrate the uncanniness of repetition (1078).

This description of Lydenberg’s could almost be taken as a blueprint for the narrative structure of ghostwritten. By the end of the novel, and despite the continual transmigration of the self, we recognize all too well “the impossibility of returning to the beginning” (1078), even when – or perhaps precisely because – the final (unforeseen) episode institutes the reappearance of Quasar, the narrator- protagonist of episode one. Quasar’s terrorist actions in the first episode – releasing nerve agents in a Tokyo Subway train that kills scores of people – are uncannily reiterated in this last episode, on this occasion in what could be called ’real’ time rather than as flashbacks as in episode one. Here, in real time, the narrator has not yet managed to escape the death train; in fact, here he is trapped on “the zombie wagon” (g: 436) with every possibility that he may die, consecutively confronted with traces of all the stories that preceded (and paradoxically also came, or had come, after) this moment. So, in Quasar’s immediate, almost hallucinatory experience we encounter signs of Satoru in the echoes of “a saxophone from long ago [that] circles in the air” (g: 434); Neal Brose’s ghostly form glimmers in the “lipped and lidded” image of Buddha – “[a]lways on the verge of words” (434) – on the cover of a book held by a fellow passenger, an image that seems to be the very same one that Brose saw shortly before his death at the Buddhist temple in Hong Kong: “Lord Buddha’s lips were full and proud. Always on the verge of words, yet never quite speaking” (104). The undefined shape of the Tea Shack lady flickers briefly in the hair of “a sleeping giant”, which is “the colour of tea. Here is the tea, here is the bowl, here is the Tea Shack, here is the mountain” (434). The noncorpum’s shade hides in the image, on the ceiling of the train compartment, of Mongolian “grasslands” over which the “Great Kahn’s horsemen thunder to the west” (434); oblique reflections of Margarita

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Latunsky play in the “warped and cracking” spine of a “glossy booklet” entitled “Petersburg, City of Masterworks” (435); imprints of ghostwriter Marco lurk in the design, on “a vinyl shopping bag [of] a crayon-coloured web that a computer might have doodled: The London Underground” (435); a hint of Mo Muntervary appears briefly in “the label of Kilmagoon whiskey [depicting] an island as old as the world” (435). Finally, as Quasar succeeds in the nick of time to escape the clutches of “the unclean” (435), desperately stumbling from the train, he collides head-on with an advertisement board inviting him to “[s]pend the night with Bat Segundo on 97.8” (436). What we find here in Quasar’s feverish struggle to exit the death train – to “evade closure”, in Lydenberg’s words – is a sequential catalogue of the preceding stories, in effect a re-reading of the entire novel that literally seems to “spawn” more stories (or further readings, insofar as each new reading can be seen as a new story) in an effort to ward off the death of the subject. This is the “repetition” that Lydenberg speaks of, the “uncanniness” of which is that there cannot be complete consonance between the first and the second, or any subsequent, repetitions of each story; importantly, such incongruity is what generates each ’new’ tale, or more precisely, enhanced versions of familiar stories. So, while the re-telling of Quasar’s story cannot alter its outcome or its effects, its re-reading, like all re-readings, can change the reader’s perception and augment her understanding of lived experience. This is evident when the opening line of the narrative, “Who was blowing on the nape of my neck” (3 – emphasis added), resounds, eerily analeptic, in its penultimate line: “Who is blowing on the nape of my neck” (436 – emphasis added). Moreover, neither of the other narratives can be read in the same way as before, after their uncanny reiteration in the final (yet ultimately also first) episode. In addition, none of the stories really ‘end’, because the ending of the novel continually brings on their re-readings (even if these are not verbatim). There can be no “final satisfaction” of the desire for plenitude in any of these tales – nevertheless, such lack of closure is precisely, and paradoxically, what provides pleasure to a reader, insofar as it prompts continual re-readings – in Lydenberg’s words, “careful navigation” (1997: 1078) – in the hope of achieving that fundamental unity, of narrative and therefore also of meaning. Lydenberg goes on to point out that such a cyclic process allows the reader to understand “the structure and experience of narrative as a convergence of origins and ends” (1997: 1079). ghostwritten therefore 36 foregrounds the way in which its narrative structure generates reading and re- reading, in the same gesture pointing to the way in which its narrative structure mirrors the fits and starts of the reading process. So we turn back to the first page of the novel, starting with the epigraph, paying minute attention to every gesture in an attempt to better grasp – this time, and time and again – “the very spring within the spring” of the overall story of lived experience.

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Part 2 Spectral reading

Upon her next reading of ghostwritten, a reader cannot help but entertain the suspicion that the epigraph foretells her doomed attempt at finding the hidden “spring” in the novel. At the same time, however, coming across the hesitation evoked in the epigraph between “the gods” of classical myth and “the finger of God” in religious myth, she is encouraged to continue, as if the choice between one and the other will reveal the meaning of the text. With this sly promise of full disclosure, the text lures us into resuming our reading.

2.2.1. “Okinawa”: fact-based fiction Though not realized upon an initial reading, the narrative convergence of origins and ends described by Robin Lydenberg (1997:1079), which I explained in part one of this chapter, is illustrated when the events of the novel’s final episode, entitled “Underground”, are traced back to its first episode entitled “Okinawa”. In this opening chapter the ‘first’ protagonist-narrator Quasar presents an analeptic, fact-based account – the incident alludes to the 1995 sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway, perpetrated by members of Aum Shinrikyo – of his part in a terrorist strike on a Tokyo subway train. This Quasar is a junior member of a millenarianist doomsday cult who believes himself to be telepathically connected to His Serendipity, the cult-leader who is purportedly endowed with superhuman powers but who is later, to Quasar’s utter dismay, arrested and detained.12 The cult views all people with disgust, calling them “unclean” (g: 3), and is awaiting the apocalyptic event — a comet's13 prophesied collision with Earth — that will destroy all humanity to herald the coming of the New Earth. On the face of it, Quasar

12 His Serendipity returns in episode nine of the novel as a “non-corporeal sentient intelligence” – also known as Arupadhatu, the “pure consciousness” that had “transmigrated” into His Serendipity (g: 30) – when he calls in to Bat Segundo’s radio show and tries to enter into a pact with the Zookeeper to destroy humanity; Zookeeper makes short shrift of this so-called “tempting proposition” (422-3) and its author. 13 The image of the comet crops up every now and again in the novel, most notably in episode seven, where Marco the ghostwriter’s one-night-stand Katy Forbes – who is also the estranged wife of Neal Brose, the narrator-protagonist of episode three of the novel – displays a birthmark in the shape of a comet. The birthmark links her to the stories being told in Mitchell’s third novel Cloud Atlas (2004), where such a naevus is ostensibly an indicator of historical continuity. The birthmark is made uncanny in that we cannot know about its intertextual import until, or unless, we read this third novel; the effect of such a prolepsis, which paradoxically functions only analeptically, is to collapse the conventional boundaries between past, present, and future. 38 seems to be the typical dupe of any charismatic religious sect; to the mind of “the thin woman” that he encounters on the island of Kumejima, Quasar is probably one of those who 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 a 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 (23).

While these words serve mainly as a critique of the cults that exploit the insecurities of social outcasts, depicting “some” people as pitiably alone and alienated, they are also a condemnation of the societies that create the conditions for such predation.14 Quasar, contemplating a Japan given over to rapacious consumerism, despairs of an undifferentiated, and indifferent, society that is defined by an “endless chain of wanting and buying”, where “[h]igh streets are becoming the same all over the world” (11-12) – a sentiment echoed verbatim in part six by narrator Margarita Latunsky when she looks at the bleakly uniform cityscape of St. Petersburg (217). In these societies, the “myths”, or stories, of capitalism have come “true”, and they fall tragically short of the plenitude that was “promised” by those in power. For example, in hope of a better world Quasar has committed all his worldly possessions to His Serendipity (9), who doubtlessly uses such donations to board his sons at an “elite school in Beverley Hills” (27); likewise, Margarita’s desperately naive dreams of settling in Switzerland with her so-called boyfriend Rudy are rudely counteracted by her cynical acknowledgement that “[e]verything is about wanting […] Things happen because of people wanting” (213). Indeed, Quasar’s “shining myth” comprises a world where there “will be no bullying. No victimising” (25); ironically, such a world apparently can only be realized through his own victimisation of others. This is a trade-off that Quasar, though seeming to be oblivious of it, unconsciously finds difficult to assimilate – he is haunted by an image from the death train, of a baby in a “woolly cap” who, strapped to her mother’s back, opened her eyes. “They were [his] eyes [...] And reflected in [his] eyes was her face. She knew what [he] was going to do. And asked [him] not to” (25).Then, later, he recalls: “She had liked me. How could she

14 The theme of predation also features strongly in both number9dream (especially in the chapter entitled “Reclaimed Land”) and Cloud Atlas (as a kind of extended metaphor). 39 have liked me? [...] She gurgled at me, smiling. [...] I wish I had smiled back. [...] Would they have survived? Or would the gas have got them?” (29-30). In that uncanny moment Quasar is briefly, disconcertingly, confronted by the other who is also he, himself, and is moved to acknowledge the shared humanity of self and other, subliminally to realize that what he finds despicable in the other always already resides within him. (His obsessive “cleansing” – “I clean myself eight or nine times a day” (26) – ironically frames him as perpetually unclean.) At this point he is literally cast in the child’s eyes as a villain, but also in his own, drawing attention to the fact that the uncanny is paradoxical; that, in the words of Lydenberg, “the outsider is always already within, that the uncanny "stranger" or "intruder" is the self” (1997: 1080). Or as Baudrillard notes, quoting Eric Gans: “In the last analysis, the victim and the persecutor are one” (2008: xii). In these images we the convergence of self and other in the eyes of a child (something that incidentally bears some resemblance to Lydenberg’s reference to the convergence of origins and ends which structures a narrative). Hence we are compelled to recognise Quasar’s own, perhaps unlikely, child-like innocence (seen in his unquestioning faith in the powers of His Serendipity, though some would call this rank gullibility), his victimhood, and the vulnerability reflected in his physical deterioration caused by starvation: “My palms have become blotchy [...] something is wrong with my skin [...] My fingernails are coming loose” (g: 26, 30). In effect, we witness in Quasar’s bodily decline the threat to the subject of its own destruction, something that is also enacted later in Quasar’s struggle to exit the death train: this threat perhaps comes about as a result of the subject “coming too close to satisfaction” (Lydenberg, 1997: 1078). In other words, the success of Quasar’s attack on the Subway portends his death; at the same time, his regret that he “had [not] smiled back” (g: 29) at the baby girl and her mother, something which together with his physical frailty stands as a sign of his innate humanity, ensures his survival. Such endurance is evident in the recursive structuring of the text, where the ending always catapults us back to the beginning again, so that Quasar’s story is continually revived. It is also apparent in the way this first episode ends, with Quasar being welcomed as “Mr Tokunaga” into the community of Kumejima, ironically by the very same “unclean”, in the person of Ota the harbourmaster, whom he despises. This Ota says:

40

‘I’ve been searching for you [...] You must be tired, after walking all the way out here, all on your own? [...] By the way, the youngsters are delighted at the prospect of a real computer man [Quasar] coming to talk to them [...] My wife would like you to join us for dinner tomorrow, if you’re free. So, Mr Tokunaga. Tell me a little about yourself...’ (32).

Ota’s kindness, his humaneness, allows Quasar the possibility of a new life as “Mr Tokunaga”, effectively freeing the subject from those inherited descriptions of its existence to which Rorty refers (1989: 29). Moreover, Ota’s open-ended invitation to Quasar to tell him “a little about [Mr Tokunaga]...” continually allows the subject to find new descriptions of its way of life, to become the other in a story about “that past which the past never knew” (29). Such a substitution, of self by other, gives rise to what Lydenberg calls “a self-doubling”, an effect of narrative “that extends beyond narrator and protagonist to include writer and reader” (1997: 1082); indeed, this self-doubling presents a “dramatization of the uncanniness of writing and reading” (1082), something that could be said to form the structural imperative of Mitchell’s novel.

2.2.2. “Tokyo”: a love story The self-doubling outlined in the first chapter of the novel continues throughout, albeit in a variety of manifestations. The ‘new’ description found in episode two, entitled “Tokyo”, presents as narrator-protagonist the young saxophone player Satoru who is the child of a repatriated Filipino prostitute and a father he has never met.15 Where Quasar’s narrative is in many ways a fact-based one, Satoru’s is more whimsical, a love-story awash with all the elements of the typical romance novel. So, when Satoru first lays eyes on Tomoyo, he is immediately love-struck, overawed by the way in which “she pulsed, invisibly, like a quasar” (a description that inevitably brings Quasar to mind, but in a favourable light that we could not have anticipated, and that reinterprets the Quasar that we ‘know’). He is overwhelmed by “the strangest feeling” that “[r]eal things had happened to her to make her how she was, and [he] wanted to know them, and read them, like a book” (g: 41). This sentiment draws an unmistakable, though no

15 Upon reflection, and in what could be seen as yet another instance of proleptic self-doubling, Satoru bears an uncanny resemblance to the narrator-protagonist of Mitchell’s second novel number9dream (2001), Eiji Miyake, a young man who is abandoned by his mother and goes to Tokyo to find his unknown father. 41 doubt fallacious, synonymy between ‘knowing’ and ‘reading’, apparently pledging that it is possible to know the other, that the other is literally an open book. (It could be said that such a parallel is precisely what undermines the idea of absolute knowing, inasmuch as reading is shown, in this novel, to obfuscate meaning.) Nevertheless, this possibility, it is suggested, is inherent in the genre of romance: in many ways, we ‘know’ how this story is going to go. Thus, in the way of so many love stories, Satoru cannot find the courage to speak to Tomoyo; it rests on fate and, in a second favourable allusion to him, Quasar’s timely (though misdirected) phone call to bring the two of them together. The moment that Tomoyo speaks to him, Satoru is compelled to acknowledge: “[t]he her that lived in her looked out through her eyes, through my eyes and at the me that lives in me” (55). As is the case in Quasar’s encounter with the baby girl on the death train, we cannot but recognize in this image the inextricability of the self and the other, that sameness of self and other that nonetheless emphasises their differences. This is what Satoru gets to ‘know’, then: they are alike in that Tomoyo is of mixed race like he is, but they are fundamentally separated through her living in Hong Kong and able to visit Tokyo only every other year; what he is eventually able to ‘read’, as if it were a romance novel, is that “[we] have to be realistic”, that their love is doomed by her having to go “back to international school in Hong Kong” on a flight that leaves in “thirty minutes” (58). In a further gesture towards the typical romance novel, Satoru’s friend Koji exhorts him to hurry to the airport to “stop her” (58); however, in an unexpected counter-gesture Satoru does nothing of the sort. Such a deviation from convention emphasizes the fact that, despite Satoru’s “odd sensation of being in a story that someone was writing” (56), the stories we tell ourselves about lived experience can never really coincide with the experience itself. As Fludernik argues, this feature of narrative allows the text to “elude experientiality […] on account of the deliberately defocalized presentation, which rules out an anchor point for experientiality either on the level of the represented world […] or on the level of the discourse [so as to shift] the responsibility [of determining an anchor point] on the reader” (2009: 131). In other words, such a defocalization compels a reader to become involved in the ‘writing’ of the narrative. Nevertheless, this “anchor point” is undone when, in another unexpected (yet strangely inevitable, generically speaking) turn of events, by the end of this episode 42 the two lovers are planning to be reunited in Hong Kong – Satoru is left feeling “as near to Paradise as [he has] ever been” (g: 64). The way in which this episode ends seems to offer closure to Satoru’s and Tomoyo’s romance, and also satisfaction – a feeling of being “near to Paradise” – to the subject (character as well as reader.) In other words, it apparently subscribes to the romantic idea that love will win out in the end. This much is evident when Mr Fujimoto, one of the clients at the CD shop, muses: Why do things happen the way they do? Since the gas attack on the subway, [...] I’ve been trying to understand [...] What is it that stops the world simply...seizing up? [...] Might the answer be “love”? (61).

Satoru indirectly answers this question when he decides to follow Tomoyo to Hong Kong, deciding that if the motivation for such life-changing decisions, for changing fate and keeping the world spinning, is “not love, then what?” (63). However, the plenitude apparently guaranteed by this answer is undermined by its very promise of fulfilment, in fact by the very framing of a supposed certainty as a question. Though we get the impression that Satoru and Tomoyo will have their happy ending, there is no description of their actually joining up other than Neal Brose’s nondescript reference to “[t]his kid and his girl” (77) in episode three. (Importantly, Satoru feels himself “close to Paradise”, not in Paradise.) As explained earlier, this couple could be any of a host of others; the reader’s assumption that they are Satoru and Tomoyo is a demand exerted by the love story genre, not actually borne out by the text itself, or arguably by the lived experience that it mimics. Nevertheless, on a textual level this love story and all others like it is what “stops the world simply ... seizing up” (61), what continually averts the death of the subject. More than this even, it is the reading of these and all other stories, what could be called a propagation of genres (insofar as each story in this novel seems to fall under a separate genre), that saves humanity from extinction. Consequently, the love story uncannily lives on when, in episode three, we find Neal Brose’s description of the Buddha on Lantau Island (104) echoing Tomoyo’s words to Satoru: “On Lantau Island there’s a big Buddha sitting on a hill ...” (56). It also persists in episode nine when deejay Bat Segundo’s playlist includes a track by “tenor saxophonist Satoru Sonada” (385), an event eerily predicted, we later realize, in the opening paragraphs of episode two when Satoru admires a customer’s “cool T-shirt” imprinted with a “bat flying around a

43 skyscraper, leaving a trail of stars” (35). At the last, when Quasar is (re)enacting the end of the world (which has always already been averted), the love story lingers on in the haunting strains of “a saxophone from long ago” (434) to play its part in the salvation of humanity.

2.2.3. The haunting in “Hong Kong” The next ’new’ story likewise contributes towards obviating the apocalypse, even when (or perhaps because) the narrator-protagonist ends up dying, as happens to Neal Brose in the third episode of the novel, entitled “Hong Kong”. In what might well have been dubbed “A Day in the Life of ...”, Neal’s narrative is a depiction of what turns out to be the final day of his existence, interspersed with some hotchpotch scraps of information about past events that led up to the present. Interestingly, Neal’s account has all the hallmarks of a ghost story: he is a double-dealing financial lawyer living (initially together with his wife, Katy Forbes) in Hong Kong, working for a less-than-upstanding international conglomerate, housed in an apartment on Lantau Island that their doomsaying neighbour, Mrs Feng, ominously regards as being “so very unlucky” (93) because its number is 144, and “four” in Chinese means “Death” (71) – it also faces the elevator doors, which are “jaws [that] eat up good luck” (72). Part of their misfortune is to be haunted by the spirit of a little Asian girl – the reasons for this haunting are not clear, but Mrs Feng is convinced that “[s]he is a child of a gwai lo16 man and a maid. The man would have left, and the maid flung the girl off one of these buildings” (92). This ghoulish description, delivered in a chillingly neutral tone, suggests that the presence of the ghost is somehow linked to the trouble Neal and Katy have conceiving a child – Mrs Feng warns that they will never conceive as long as they live in that apartment because the spirit “sees [Katy] as a rival” (93) for Neal’s attention. However, Neal refuses to move even when, in a clearly symbolic gesture, the poltergeist locks them out of their home one night. “Looking back, [he realizes] that was the beginning of the end” (97) of their relationship. The spirit apparently succeeded in driving them apart, as Katy soon moves back to , eventually suing Neal for divorce. In a further development that is even more uncanny, Neal starts up a

16 This is a Cantonese phrase used to refer to foreigners, particularly Caucasian males, usually in a deprecatory way (no doubt as Mrs Feng intends for it to be understood here.) Also of note is that the phrase literally translates into “ghost man” [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwai_lo]. 44 torrid, almost obscene affair with their Chinese cleaning lady (who is in all likelihood the great-granddaughter of the Tea Shack lady from episode four) soon after Katy’s departure. The maid takes Katy’s place in a darkly sinister way, using her , wearing her clothes, and forcing Neal to declare in the throes of an appalling passion that “Katty Bitch is bitch trash” (90). This unnatural relationship of theirs seems indirectly to have been foretold by Mrs Feng’s claim that the ghost is the murdered child of a “ghost man” and a maid; in a macabre, and not wholly logical twist the ghostly girl, who is the only “child” that Neal and Katy would ever have, now somehow becomes the ghastly product of the union between Neal and the maid, his “host daughter” (86), the one he realizes as he lies dying who “has [his] eyes, and the maid’s body, in miniature” (109). The sense of the uncanny deepens as Neal’s experiences that day become increasingly more frenetic. His illicit activities – the laundering of money into account 1390931 on behalf of one Gregorski (whom we meet in episode six as the Russian mobster involved with a gang of art thieves) at the behest of his boss Denholm Cavendish (who is the brother of Tim Cavendish, Marco the ghostwriter’s publisher in episode seven; Tim Cavendish himself is also featured in Cloud Atlas) – are under investigation by Huw Llewellyn (who appears again in episode eight as the friend with whom Mo Muntervary finds temporary shelter while on the run from U.S. Government agents.) This scrutiny of his affairs increases the unease Neal feels about his job, his wife leaving him, his unsavoury relationship with the maid, and being haunted by the ghost of a slain child. So severe does his anxiety become that his health starts rapidly deteriorating: “My skin buzzed. My immortality was ebbing away [...] I could feel my organs sag against each other, still functioning, but slowing like tired swimmers” (104). Indeed, in retrospect there are clear signs of Neal’s eventual demise: on that day, he relishes the bus trip to the ferry where “everything is out of [his] hands” so that he can “zombify” (72); he looks up to see his reflection in the “smoked glass” ceiling of the elevator – the “jaws [that] eat up good luck” (72) – which gives him the sense of his “spirit walking” (72); out on the hill where the statue of the Buddha stands he looks to where “a buzzard circled, and there was an anvil-shaped cloud” (89). The fact that he keeps checking the time on his “Rolex” (78, 88, 99, 102) seems to hint at the idea that Neal’s time was running out, confirmed by his realization that “[t]ime [had] lost [him]” and that

45 he’d left his Rolex “on a dragon’s nose17” (102). And towards the end of this episode, shortly before he succumbs to a heart attack, Neal senses the presence of the ghost, how “[s]he brushed nearby, and blew on the back of [his] neck” (105). This phrase is an allusion to both the beginning and the end of this novel; in fact, it almost seems like an answer to Quasar’s question/s: “Who is [was] blowing on the nape of my neck?” (3, 436). In this we see, once again, a convergence of origins and endings, a spacio-temporal doubling that clearly demonstrates the way in which narrative is uncanny, representing the subject to be in two places at once – both the past and the future – rendering the present manifestation a mere spectre. Neal himself can be seen as a ghost (something that had already been suggested in his being gwai lo), resembling what Brian Dillon, in his discussion of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, describes as a “spectral conjuring of death-in- life”18 (2011 – online). So, as his story comes to an end, Neal exclaims somewhat hysterically: “Now I understand what this insane fucking day has been about! Hilarious! I am fucking dying!” (g: 108). In other words, although his death comes as a surprise (to both Neal and the reader), it was always already on the cards, perhaps the only likely outcome for this ghost story – thus the subject’s existence is always shadowed by immanent, and imminent, death. In fact, this ghost story continually draws attention to the immanence of death, as when Neal points out: Unless you’ve lived with a ghost, you can’t know the truth of it. [...] For the last few months I’ve been living with three women. One [the maid] was a ghost who is now a woman. One [his wife] was a woman, who is now a ghost. One is a ghost, and will always be (96).

Ironically, “the truth of it” has always also been the spectrality inherent in Neal’s existence itself, meaning that he does not really know the truth of ‘it’ either. In effect, he is unwittingly haunted by his own death: the ghost/s that he lives with is the prospect of his own dying. As a result, Neal feels ill at ease in his existence, moved to ask: “What life is this?” (78) – this feeling of unhomeliness constitutes the essence of haunting, in so far as the ghost is barred from, and has to impose on, the domicilium of its own being. In other words, explains Lydenberg, the ghostly subject inhabits “a domestic space [that has been] rendered unfamiliar” (1997:

17 It may be important here that, in the mythologies of the Orient, the dragon is a symbol of wisdom and longevity. 18 Strictly speaking, this idea involves the aesthetics of photography; it is, however, also useful here in describing the equivocal context of the subject-in-becoming. 46

1082); attempts by this subject to (re)familiarize its space precipitates “the proliferation of storytelling”, also accounting for “the ways stories can haunt their readers or listeners” (1082). Indeed, Neal finds himself being haunted by his encounter with “this kid and his girl” (g: 77) in the coffee bar on the eve of his dying. He keeps wondering about them, “how they had met” (97, 105), and imagines (in the same way that a reader would) a story for them in which “the Japanese kid is getting over his jet lag” in a mansion up on Victoria Peak with “[h]is girl bringing him lemon tea on a silver tray” (97), or where the young man “was playing his saxophone in a bar somewhere [with] his girl watching him” (105). We realize that it is Neal’s own story that is giving rise to these imaginings, inasmuch as he would, “if Mephistopheles had genied his way from the greasy ketchup bottle” to let Neal “be that kid”, seize the opportunity “[l]ike a fucking shot” (78) – it is the failures in his own life that drive him to make up a ‘better’ one for the protagonist of the story he imagines. Neal’s existence, as he sees it, involves “the Story of What Happened to Love” (94) in which things had gone horribly awry: he therefore conjures up for the young man and his paramour a life of idyllic bliss. Ironically, this would probably have been exactly a reader’s strategy at the end of episode two (even if there were no guarantees of such a happy outcome). Hence Neal becomes the embodiment (or doppelganger, if you will) of the reader, especially insofar as, according to Rorty’s reading of Freud’s observations on the unconscious, “the social process of literalizing a metaphor [that is, reading]19 is duplicated in the fantasy life of an individual” (1989: 37). Nevertheless, this reader is ever under threat of annihilation, always haunted by, and guarding against, the spectre of her own demise or, perhaps more accurately, the termination of her specific reading.20 So, says Lydenberg, “[a]s the double of lived experience, mimetic narrative echoes birth, death, and the wandering between them that constitutes life … [stories, and the reading thereof] provide an illusion of mastery that momentarily obscures the imminence and immanence of death” (1997: 1081).

19 According to Jonathan Culler’s description, reading is “an attempt to understand writing by determining the referential and rhetorical modes of a text, translating the figurative into the literal, for example, and removing obstacles in the quest for a coherent result” (1982: 81). 20 Whence what could perhaps be called the anxiety of interpretation, that one may not have ‘understood’ the meaning of the text correctly. This aspect of reading stems from Harold Bloom’s description of the anxiety of influence, discussed in Chapter 1. 47

In many ways, then, Neal seems to have lost mastery of his life, so that it becomes anathema to him. One could even say that he is critically divided against himself, as is evident in the way he often speaks to himself (largely in derogatory terms), and of himself in the third person (g: 103), a doubling of the subject that is evident in the self-directed comment: “I don’t understand you sometimes” (79). One can see in this how Neal recasts himself as other, a kind of doppelganger that he expects should take responsibility for his various actions. Accordingly he sees himself as “a man of departments, compartments, apartments [...] In each one lives a Neal Brose who operates quite independently of the neighbouring Neal Broses” (103). Presumably such a parcelling-out of the self is a further attempt to keep death at bay; however, in the end Neal realizes that he had “divided up [his] possible futures, put them into separate accounts, and now they’re all spent” (108). This insight articulates Freud’s argument regarding the repression involved in the constitution of the doppelganger, that it is a “doubling, dividing, and interchanging of the self” that begins as a narcissistic “insurance against the destruction of the ego” and an “assurance of immortality”, later to turn into an “uncanny harbinger of death” (in Lydenberg, 1997: 1079). Jean Baudrillard, for his part, observes that the doppelganger, or double, is an imaginary figure, which, just like the soul, the shadow, the mirror image, haunts the subject like his other, which makes it so that the subject is simultaneously itself and never resembles itself again, which haunts the subject like a subtle and always averted death […] the strangeness and at the same time the intimacy of the subject to itself are played out [in the figure of the doppelganger] (2010: 95).

In other words, the subject lives on, over and over again, in this other who is also its doppelganger (or an unidentical manifestation of itself, an uncanny image that we encounter again in episode seven when memoirist Alfred describes seeing himself go past a restaurant in which he himself is sitting.) In Mitchell’s novel, this subject endures when we witness the ghost of Neal Brose walking [h]and in hand” with the ghost of the little girl “up the steps of the Big Bright Buddha, brighter and brighter, into a snowstorm of silent light” (g: 109), when a flicker of his presence plays in the image of the Buddha in the final pages of the text (434), or when his tentative presence is felt in the persistent links to Satoru in episode two, Andrei Gregorski the crime boss in episode six, the estranged wife Katy in episode seven. (Uncannily, his story also continues – or rather, commences – when he makes his

48 debut as a teenager in Mitchell’s fourth novel, Black Swan Green.) Once again the subject persists, this time despite its dying – in fact, its dying and coming back to ‘life’ again is a prerequisite for the function of this narrative as ghost story, and in the continual re-telling of those stories that will hold in abeyance the end of the world.

2.2.4. “Holy Mountain”: a personal history The motif of haunting is taken up again in the next episode of the novel, entitled “Holy Mountain”, though in a rather different context than before. Here the narrating subject takes the form of an old Chinese peasant woman, proprietor of a tea shack on the slopes of Mount Emei, whose constant companion is the talking Tree outside her shack. She relates the tales that make up her 70-odd year history, personal accounts that are set amidst the turbulent events in the broader history of modern-day China. We learn from these tales that the woman lived her whole life on the side of the mountain, leading a Spartan existence marked by hardship and suffering at the hands of various functionaries of power. There is the story of how, when she was in her early teens (around 1911), she was raped by “the Warlord’s Son” with her father accepting two Siamese bowls as recompense (116); how, to her father’s eternal disgust she gave birth to a baby girl – “If it had been a boy, the Warlord’s Son would have showered [them] with gifts!” (119); how she had to hand over her daughter to relatives to raise, so as to “conceal the shame [she’d] inflicted on [their] family’s honour” (119). This is followed by the story of the time (somewhere between 1937 and 1941) when the invading Japanese came to their shack and ransacked it, how they shamed and tortured her father, but how on this occasion she fought off her attackers, managing to escape from them and hide in a nearby cave, and how she had to rebuild the shack with her own hands after they had left (120-2). This last seems to be a tale that keeps repeating itself (or perhaps history repeating itself): after the Japanese come the Kuomintang who “loot what food and treasure they can, and burn or poison what they can’t” (125), then “the communists” with their “people’s revolution” that brought “famine [...] up the Valley” (130), followed by the “Red Guard” of Mao Tse Dong with their war-chant: “’What can be smashed – [...] Must be smashed!” (136). Each time the outcome of the story appears to be the same, with the woman’s tea shack ruined and her life in shambles. Each time she returns to rebuild her shack and carry on with her 49 existence, patiently (if rather hopelessly) musing: “What choice is there?” (126). All of this suggests that history had determined the old woman’s stories in advance; in other words, her life is largely dependent on the doings and decisions of more powerful socio-political entities. Indeed, this episode is strongly reminiscent of the historical novel inasmuch as its story is, in line with Georg Lukács’s seminal definition of the genre, a product of social forces that enable us to “re-experience the social and human motives that led men to think, feel and act just as they did in historical reality” (1962: 42). In an oddly indirect manner, and in terms more disparaging than Lukács had perhaps envisioned, this is precisely what happens in this episode, that the old woman manages to recreate the historical reality of an oppressive patriarchal society much more accurately than any history boo, or propagandistic government campaign can do (or is allowed to do.) Her individual stories express, and allow us to re-cognize, the lived experience of women and of the peasantry under the misguided, and frequently megalomaniacal rule of various institutions of power. In this we are again reminded of Rorty’s observation regarding “the universality and necessity of the individual and the contingent” (1989: 26), which here can be taken to refer to the way in which history in general is meronymically made up of personal histories – in other words, how idiosyncratic histories serve to catalogue history at large – and the way in which ‘history’ is also always a story told (or written) by an individual. This subjective aspect of the histories we tell ourselves (and that are told us) is most evident towards the end of the old woman’s tale, when a journalist from the “Party Newspaper” presses her for “stories that will interest [his] readers”; when she refuses to tell him any, he goes ahead and writes his stupid story anyway, inventing [her] every word [...] Apparently [she] had always admired Deng Xiaoping’s enlightened leadership. [She’d] never even heard of Tiananmen Square, but apparently [she] believed the authorities responded in the only possible way. [She] added ‘writers’ to [her] list of people not to trust. They make everything up (g: 150).

In this way, the ‘history’ recorded by the journalist drastically reconfigures the old woman’s experiences, in the process creating a subject who, though nominally related to this one, is really only its unidentical double. Thus ‘history’ creates an identity for the old woman; however, her stories recast and revivify this identity so that, in the words of Jerome de Groot when he discusses Lukács’s

50 definition, historical narratives “communicate to people a sense of their own historicity, and the ways that they might be able to construct historically inflected identities for themselves” (2010: 29).21 In other words, this episode of Mitchell’s novel suggests that, notwithstanding the ostensibly teleological nature of history – that is, despite the looming apocalypse – the subject is allowed to create, and endlessly recreate, itself through the tales it tells. Yet the old woman’s mistrust of writers also reflects on the ways in which this process of creation is inherently flawed – involving as it does a kind of perfection that can never be possible – so to highlight questions of truth in writing, and of knowledge in literature. These issues are raised in various instances in the novel: the noncorpum in episode five, for example, maintains “a vow of silence”, lest its voice in the minds of various hosts impart knowledge that would leave behind it “a trail of mystics, lunatics and writers” (g: 172); Mo Muntervary, in episode eight, compares her midnightly labours in “pursuit of insight” to the mental and emotional isolation suffered by “chess players or writers or mystics” (343); Luisa Rey, in her conversation with Bat Segundo in episode nine, avers that “lunatics are writers whose works write them” – though not all lunatics are writers, “most writers are lunatics” (386). 22 This last reference also alludes to the epigraph of the novel, taken from Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which is concerned with coincidence and its relation to fate and free will – or perhaps, in the old woman’s words, to why “events have this life of their own” (138). Set in Peru during the early eighteenth century, Wilder’s novel recounts the unexpected and inexplicable collapse of an ancient bridge, and the resultant death of five people. The narrative expounds on a Franciscan monk’s attempts to reconstruct the histories of the five victims so as to “justify the ways of God to man” (Wilder, 2007: 5). Significantly, his efforts come to naught in the end, as the Catholic Church declares his work to be heretical, judging that it should be “burned in the Square with its author” (118). In all of these references, then, writing is seen as a mad and mystical – sometimes

21 This aspect of historical novels can be seen to be at work in all kinds of writing to some degree or another. What is interesting here is its parallel to the “historicity” of the reader in various theoretical frameworks; in their individual stories of reading, readers are likewise enabled to “construct historically inflected identities for themselves”. 22 It may be important to note that the repetition of the phrase in these three instances is not identical; they are similar, yet distinct iterations by three different subjects, each of which is also the undifferentiated speaking ‘I’. 51 even spiritual – endeavour that defies logic and reason; the epigraph in particular emphasises how reconstructions of the subject’s history, or even the writing of its story, cannot provide the kind of knowledge that would guarantee the truth of its lived experience. In other words, writers cannot be trusted to reflect reality despite their most honest attempts. Nevertheless, and perhaps because of this wariness of the written word, there is a certain flavour of truthfulness to the old woman’s rather stoic and whittled-down accounts, a sense of the timeless certainties about human existence in how, on “Holy Mountain, all the yesterdays and tomorrows spin around again sooner or later” (g: 113). On this mystical “prayer wheel of time” (113) it seems believable that the old woman should encounter the spectre of her younger self, and vice versa: so, after being raped, the adolescent girl is comforted by the “spirit” of “an old woman” who sings “a lullaby about a coracle, a cat, and the river running round” (117); then, many years later, after the death of Mao, the old woman climbs the stairs to find the “spirit” of a young girl lying “sleepless with fear”, whom she soothes with “the only lullaby [she knows], about a cat, a coracle, and a river running round” (144).23 In a very literal way, these descriptions symbolize the enduring spirit of this woman, her strong and self-reliant character. At the same time, we see once again how the haunting of the subject by its double literally, and uncannily, ensures its survival, in that the old woman can proffer, over and over, her younger self advice on how to stay alive, which she passes on again, through remembering, to her older self. Strangely enough, then, the truthfulness of the old woman’s stories is related to her overcoming the limitations of her historical context – perhaps in the way of Rorty’s “Nietzschean overcoming” (1989: 29) – and is found not so much in her historical references as in the elements of magic realism that intersperse them. In other words, it is the insertion of certain unbelievable details (such as spirits, and a talking Tree that bears five different kinds of fruit) into a realistic setting that ironically gives credence to these tales, likely as a result of the woman’s own unswerving belief in such phenomena; it is also this magic realism that adds force to the old woman’s dying thought, that "it’s not the truth that much matters” (g: 151).The concluding lines of this episode describes a “ribbon of smoke uncoils as it

23 Once again, there is a subtle sequential shift in the repetition of the phrase, making it similar but not identical to the first, perhaps to suggest the iterability through time of the unidentical subject. 52 disappears up, up, and up” (151) to symbolize the old woman’s spirit leaving her body – or transmigrating to the next phase of existence. As a result, one is left with the impression that even though ostensibly truthful historical accounts cannot always be relied upon to give an accurate rendition of the individual’s lived experience, the subject does continue to exist in such mystical, yet ingenuous aspects of storytelling (this in addition to the now-familiar fact of links to other episodes, which could be said to be ‘mystical’ in their own right). In this way, and as is the case in all of the preceding episodes, the narrator’s tales serve to avert the apocalypse, and the death of the subject, this time by lending credibility to the historicity of the individual.

2.2.5. Magic realism in “Mongolia” The idea of credibility is again tested in the fifth episode of the novel, “Mongolia”, which is structured around the mystical idea of transmigration. The narrator of this episode is a “noncorpum” (172), a wandering consciousness, or perhaps a lost soul, that moves from one human host to the next in its attempt to trace the origin of “the first story” it can remember hearing, “to find the source of the story that was already there, right at the beginning of ‘I’, sixty years ago” (164). In fact, this one story is the only memory it has of a previous existence. Curiously, the fable the entity searches for concerns the “three who think about the fate of the world”: the crane who is careful to tread “lightly” lest the mountains collapse and the trees tumble down; the locust who keeps watch for the “flood [that] will come and deluge the world”; and the bat who flutters “up to the sky, and down to the ground, and up to the sky again” to keep it from falling and shattering (157-8). (This last image is recalled again in episode nine, when the conversations between deejay Bat Segundo and Zookeeper serve to delay the imminent apocalypse.) In other words, it is a parable about attempts to keep the world from coming to an end; implicit in this is the sense that the continual retelling of the fable is itself just such a safeguard against utter destruction24 (perhaps because it allows a constant convergence of origins and ends, an uncanny space in which the ending is forever suspended.) At length it transpires that the incorporeal being who hunts for the story had once been an eight-year old Buddhist boy from a remote Mongolian

24 This time-honoured function of storytelling goes back to Arabian Nights (1706), where Scheherazade postpones her execution by each night initiating, but not ending, a new story to tell the wrathful Shahryãr. 53 village, whose soul was transported by a group of monks into the body of a young girl in an attempt to save him from being executed by Communist soldiers. However, the transmigration goes awry, so that, in what could very well be an enactment of the postmodern idea of the ‘divided subject’, and likely also mimicking Lydenberg’s reference to a doubling of the self (1997: 1082), all the boy’s memories are passed on to the girl while the rest of his amnesiac spirit ends up in a Chinese soldier (leading the noncorpum to the “Holy Mountain” (g: 172) where for a brief time it “found companionship with an old woman who lived in a tea shack and believed [it] was a speaking tree”). Henceforth the soul of the boy is obliged to roam from one mind to the next, in effect trying to regain its sense of self together with its lost memories while, in a poignant twist, able to retain every memory from each of the minds he inhabits. However, much as the old woman in the previous episode discovered about writing, it finds that “access to memory does not guarantee access to truth” (175). After many years of journeying, it finally comes across concrete proof of the origin of the fable when, in the tea lady’s shack,25 it hears a woman telling the story to her son (143). In rapid succession it now transmigrates between hosts, for a short while also inhabiting the mind of one Suhbataar, “a senior agent of the Mongolian KGB with a disdain for vulnerable things” (180).26 In the process, the disembodied spirit is at last reunited with the Mongolian girl, now a grandmother, who holds his memories. At this junction it is presented with a choice: to be reconstituted in the “flesh and bones” (202) of the newborn Mongolian child who is the granddaughter of that same girl, so to regain its memories and become ‘whole’ again (even if subject to the vagaries of physical existence); or to move on once more to become immortal, though forever homeless: I considered my future as a noncorpum. Nowhere in the world would be closed to me. I could try to seek out other noncorpa, the company of immortals. I could transmigrate into presidents, astronauts, messiahs. I could plant a garden on a mountainside under camphor trees. I would never grow old, get sick, fear death, die.

25 Significantly, that moment in the fourth episode, when the Westerner inhabited by the noncorpum suddenly starts speaking fluent Cantonese and abruptly leaves the shack, is as inexplicable to a reader as it is to the old woman. It only makes sense in retrospect (and only to the readers), when we get to the next episode. Paradoxically, the explanation for this strange incident, which one would expect to reduce the mystical quality of the tea shack lady’s perception, makes it even stranger and more uncanny. 26 This Suhbataar reappears in Mitchell’s second novel, number9dream, as Leatherjacket: his presence here precipitates a chain of intertextuality that becomes the structural force in the second text and persists in Cloud Atlas. 54

I looked down at the feeble day-old body in front of me, her metabolism dimming, minute by minute. Life expectancy in Central Asia is forty-three, and falling. ‘Touch her’ (202).

After initially hesitating before the options it faces, the wandering spirit opts to become mortal. In a way its return to corporeal form is literally also a return to its beginnings, and it seems to find some kind of equilibrium in this choice (much like the textual equilibrium Todorov speaks of (in Leitch 2010: 2029), mentioned in part one of this chapter). However, this embodiment as a baby girl some time in its remote future is still an unidentical reconstitution of the boy that once was, a consciousness the same and yet radically different from before. One may even speak of an enhanced level of consciousness, insofar as it is implied in the text that the new entity is now an amalgamation of her own memories and those of countless others, on the verge of forging another identity in which new memories will come into being. At this point in the novel it becomes almost impossible to ignore the metaphoric facility of such a narrative innovation: the resemblance (or perhaps unidentical sameness) between the roving entity and the average reader is virtually unmistakeable, for this is precisely what readers do – they range from one text to the next, temporarily finding a home in each before moving on in order to find the one story that will define their being and ward off death, or, as is the case with the noncorpum, allow for a renewed embodiment of the self. Indeed, more so than the preceding ones, this episode demonstrates the uncanniness, not only of narrative, but also of reading, a strangeness brought about, as Lydenberg points out when she discusses the uncanny, by the innately alien territory of language where, like the noncorpum, one is “not quite at home with one's surroundings, oneself, or one's death” (1997: 1079). Consequently reading, one could say, is that “uncanny experience of wandering around in someone else's words, [...] betrayed by a symbolic order that seems to promise some defence against the human realities of desire and death” (1083). A reader, like the noncorpum, needs must make a home where she finds herself in a bid to attain the knowledge she seeks; however, this momentary stay also precipitates the next excursion, when knowledge and the ‘truth’ it apparently holds once again (and continually, as demonstrated in the previous episode, as well as in the epilogue) eludes her. Her only remaining option

55 then is, as Lydenberg would describe it (quoting from Samuel Kimball’s discussion of uncanny narration in Moby Dick), to "make a narrative home of homelessness" (1083).27 This compromise is, in a certain sense, what the noncorpum’s decision to reside permanently in the body of the baby girl amounts to, and is also the resolution available to a reader. One could say that the wandering entity chooses to house its memories, and its stories, in an unfamiliar dwelling so as to ensure its continued existence, even if on a different level. The freedom it had enjoyed as a disembodied consciousness, the same freedom ostensibly offered in narrative to readers – to go anywhere and be anyone, to be immortal and fearless – has turned out to be an illusion. The subject’s status as homodiegetic narrator comprises limited information that is always bound by the demands of the story, much as a reader is tied to the consciousness of such a first-person perspective that, according to Borghart and Madelein, “allows an identification of reader [with] narrator” (2003:46). So, for all its appearance of omniscience, the noncorpum is still the first-person narrator who has imperfect knowledge, particularly of the larger scheme in which its search for “the first story” is connected to the stories that surround it. For example, while the young-girl-turned-grandmother tells the noncorpum that she had been expecting its arrival since seeing “the comet” (g: 201) – also described by the tea shack lady (135) – neither of them is aware how this phenomenon is linked to Quasar and the doomsday cult (also evident in the noncorpum’s description (160) of some minds being “like quasars”), or to Katy Forbes and, by extension, the stories in Cloud Atlas. And even if a reader is, for her part, aware of these intra- and intertextual links, mirroring the noncorpum’s seeming omniscience, she is similarly constricted by the fact that the significance of such connections is always slipping just beyond her grasp. Moreover, the reference to the comet evokes and becomes enmeshed with the themes, of preclusion and redemption, in the fable sought by the noncorpum, in that it is a sign both of the world ending and of a new existence beginning. Such a paradoxical entanglement once again draws attention to the way in which all narrative, and all reading, is an uncanny convergence of origins and endings, a space where the

27 One could argue that, broadly speaking, all narrative is an articulation of the (impossible) attempt to go back home (to find one’s origins, one’s self, one’s identity, and so forth), what Lydenberg sees as the futility of “restoring the imagined union with the mother” (1997: 1078). 56 story must end while yet persisting as the next new story, so to secure the continued existence of storytelling. This much is evident when, as the noncorpum is reborn, [o]utside, bats dangle from high places, fluttering up to the sky, and down to the ground, and up to the sky again, checking that all was well. Inside, [its] wail, screamed from the top of [its] eighteen-hour-old lungs, fills the ger (202).

Consequently, the embodiment of the noncorpum’s memories, what could be called the concretization of its experientiality, ensures that “all is well”, that creation will endure (paradoxically also because, on a textual level, and despite its physical reconstitution, the noncorpum continues its disembodied roaming, (re)appearing in other episodes of the novel, as well as by proxy when Suhbataar resurfaces in number9dream). Indeed, this embodiment is key to narrativization – the impulse the reader has to, in simple terms, make the story work as a story. As Fludernik demonstrates in her discussion of narrativity and experientiality, the basic “existential properties [of narrative] are grounded in the first-person narrator's role as a personalized teller figure and its necessary embodiment (2005: 189), vital to narrativity (the potential for events and phenomena to be transformed into stories) is the fact of “human immundation of situational embodiment” (234). In simple terms, this means that a story gains significance only when a reader, through familiarizing (or personalizing) the strangeness of the disembodied narrator, can accept, and appropriate, its humanness (which can perhaps also be seen as its historicity) – when, in effect, she herself ceases journeying (however fleetingly) and is, through a narrator, embodied in the text.

2.2.6. A crime thriller in “Petersburg” After the reader’s brief sojourn while the noncorpum takes bodily form at the end of episode five, she resumes her journey in order to find out what this novel means. So we encounter in the next story, entitled “Petersburg”, first-person narrator-protagonist Margarita Latunsky, who holds a “meagre sinecure” (g: 205) as a curator at the Hermitage Museum in post-Soviet Petersburg. She28 is the mistress of the museum’s rather sleazy chief curator, and girlfriend to the abusive

28 It is interesting to note how, in my narrativizing each subject’s story, the first-person narrator is re- articulated as third-person object. This aspect of the reader’s engagement with texts will be further developed in the conclusion. 57

Rudi, who is the nominal leader of a band of art-thieves that exploits Margarita’s position at the museum to steal masterpieces and replace them with forgeries. Other dramatis personae in this story include Jerome the forger (friend to Alfred from the next episode, who lives in London and is the subject of a memoir being written by ghostwriter and narrator Marco), Russian crime boss Gregorski (mentioned in episode three), who procures buyers for the stolen artworks while pocketing most of the profits, and the Mongolian hit man Suhbataar (who first appears in the previous episode), who is apparently the go-between for the buyer of the gang’s latest prize, Delacroix’s Eve and the Serpent. The proceeds from the sales of the stolen artworks had been laundered all along under Rudi’s direction through a Hong Kong bank account; when the person in charge of the account, Neal Brose, suddenly “dropped dead of diabetes” (259), Rudi’s activities fell under suspicion and the gang is under threat of being eradicated. The story ends with everything in complete disarray: while the heist does turn out to be successful, Jerome fears that the painting will be seized by Suhbataar and he poisons Rudi so that he can escape with it himself. Margarita (at this point unaware of Rudi’s murder, and intent on retrieving the booty in order to secure their future) shoots and kills Jerome before he can abscond; Suhbataar eventually lays claim to the painting on behalf of Gregorski, leaving Margarita at the last “alone staring at the locked door” (261). In the scenario posited in this episode, Margarita can be likened to an aged and deposed Mata Hari (whose real name was, perhaps significantly, Margaretha Zelle): Margarita too had once been “an actress and dancer” (238) who enjoyed an elevated social status and the adulation of powerful men, having been, during the height of the Soviet era, the “concubine” of a “politburo minister” (207) and later of “an admiral in the Pacific Fleet” (211); she too had once functioned, it is intimated (260), as a sleeper agent (though never discovered and convicted as was Mata Hari.) Her story takes the form of a crime thriller – one gets the feel of a typical film noir setting in the depiction of “Nevsky Prospect, [as] a street of ghosts if ever there was one” and of the eerie “White Nights” in which “[b]luish midnight dims into indigo at about two” (217); moreover, there is the usual escalation of suspense as the time for the heist draws near and the endeavour is put at risk by various complications (such as one of Margarita’s colleagues confronting her after the heist (253), apparently about the stolen painting, which turns out to be a false alarm.) 58

Contrary to the norm, however, this crime story is told from the first-person perspective of the conventionally marginalized female subordinate – in the typical (male-oriented and -dominated) crime thriller, the woman is most often the victim, the one to be killed off as what could be called ‘collateral damage’ to secure the outcome of the plot. In other words, where the ‘hero’ of the crime thriller is customarily a male police detective or private investigator, or in certain instances even the (usually male) perpetrator of the crime, in this version the male protagonist is side-lined by the expendable female walk-on. (Curiously, such a displacement morphs into absence when the investigator here turns out to be a woman (Tatyana Makuch), and two of the male perpetrators end up being killed.) In effect then, rather than a celebration of male prowess, which is generally linked to male domination, this now becomes a story about the victimisation of women, which is usually the silenced subtext of male domination. The role of the woman in a Westernized, white, male-dominated society – and her subsequent institutionalized victimisation (what Simone de Beauvoir (1949: online) calls “an obstinate perversity”) – is historically tied up with beliefs about her part in what could possibly be seen as the first crime: original sin. This theme is introduced in Margarita’s story through the Delacroix painting, the images in which evoke the well-worn argument that the weak-willed and gullible Eve was instrumental in the Fall of Man. Moreover, the painting also alludes to the question of transcendental knowledge, how the price humanity (represented by Adam) had to pay for Eve’s attainment of “Forbidden Knowledge” (208) was for humankind to be left forever tainted and sundered from its perfect origins – ironically causing it to lose access to the ‘perfect’ knowledge it had sought – forever predisposed, in other words, to the criminal act. The first crime, then, violated the ideal order of Creation; one could say that the typical crime narrative concerns the restoration of a semblance of this order, which applies, as John Scaggs explains in his discussion of the chronology of crime narratives, to both the social and the textual dimension (2005: 7-32). Such a reinstatement implies a return to equilibrium, and a kind of justice in the rehabilitation of unruly elements;29 nevertheless, it is a rehabilitation that seeks the uncompromised return to a paradisiacal state of pure innocence and

29 One is again reminded of the ambiguous relationship between story and plot, where the story rehabilitates the contrariness of the plot in the same gesture through which the plot regulates the story by disarranging it. 59 blameless not-knowing (or perfect knowledge). This attempt is doomed by its very definition, seeing that knowledge – that which undoes innocence – once gained, cannot be unlearned. Consequently, the concept of a justice that would fully restore order – or (re)instate the unscathed past as though it is an inaugural event – is rendered inoperative, becoming but a necessary veneer of righteousness, a palliative for the unacceptable fact that no measure of justice can erase the crime that has been committed. If the crime under investigation here is the victimization of women, it is easy to see how Margarita falls into that category. Her childhood was marked by abandonment, it would seem, her father “a famous movie director [who] never acknowledged [her] publicly” and her mother a self-absorbed social climber who passed on her looks, “though Christ knows she gave [Margarita] nothing else” (g: 238). A further instance of Margarita’s familial estrangement is found in the throw- away, bitterly indifferent mention of “a dear, ailing sister” (217) whose “unopened” letter Margarita burns as she watches “the front of flame turn the bitch’s words into a ribbon of smoke. Rise, spiral, and disappear, up, and up, and up” (218).30 Moreover, as a young woman, Margarita’s “Kremlin official lover insisted” (236) she have an abortion, after which he abandoned her to deal with the consequences of a bungled operation, leaving her barren and stripped of what is generally viewed as the essence of womanhood. Hence, in a society where youthful female beauty (and traditionally also fertility) is a commodity, she is an obsolete product, cast aside – “Nobody notices. Nobody even recognizes me” (205) – and old before her time – “My feet shouldn’t ache so much, not at my age” (225).31 Now she is the girlfriend of a much younger man who takes advantage of her emotional insecurities, who abuses her both mentally and physically, reducing her to the pathetic dupe that keeps making excuses for his violently erratic behaviour (215), fooling herself into believing that “he knows he is the centre of [her] world, and [she] knows that [she] is the centre of his” (245). All of this is proof of Margarita’s victimhood, serving to confirm the impugnment of order in her story, on the textual

30 These words present a broken echo of the phrase used to describe the old woman’s transmigration in episode four (151), their acrimonious tone a perversion of the promise of sublimation implied by the Tea Shack lady’s death; such spiritual pessimism plays into the theme of the abused woman articulated in this episode. 31 The depiction of Margarita’s physical frailty faintly echoes the descriptions, in the first episode, of Quasar’s deteriorating health, and of Neil Brose’s waning wellbeing in the third episode. 60 level as well as on the social (not only in light of her adulterous lifestyle and involvement in criminal activities, but also insofar as her abuse is a perversion of a communal ethos). One could then say that the social and textual equilibrium of Margarita’s story is already dysfunctional before the narrative starts: the fact that the female first-person perspective (which is also customarily that of the victim) holds sway is a disruption of conventional generic regulation, what could be called an unheimliche show of that which “is [usually] concealed and kept out of sight” (Freud in Leitch 2010: 827). The way in which the episode then ends, with Margarita shooting and killing her boyfriend’s murderer, seems to downplay her status as victim to cast her as both victor and wrongdoer, thus deepening the initial sense of defamiliarization. Yet in the end, in another uncanny turnabout, Margarita’s status as victim is irrevocably confirmed – she is the only one left standing, “staring at [a] locked door” (g: 261), to be held to justice by “Miss Makuch and her Capital Transfer Inspectorate”, merely another of the “[p]awns that get sacrificed in endgames” (260). In other words, Margarita’s attempts to wrest control away from the male figures that dominate her life come to naught. More precisely, her efforts are doomed from the outset, as we can see from the fact Suhbataar had removed the “five golden bullets” from the weapon she thinks to use against him (261), and in the fact that Rudi is already dead when she kills Jerome in an attempt to safeguard her future with Rudi. In a sense, then, Margarita is trying to salvage a future she never had – she fantasizes about moving to Switzerland where the “air is clear [...] and the water pure”, where her barren state can be remedied to create a prelapsarian paradise in which “Rudi can teach [their son] to hunt in the mountains while [she] teaches [their] little Kitten how to cook” (237). Tragically, this is a return to past innocence that can never be, for having never existed, an attempt also to salvage a past she never had (Jacques Derrida (1989: 16, n.9) calls this an “originary” loss.) Moreover, the Edenic state she envisages ironically perpetuates those supposedly ideal gender roles – of the active male hunter- gatherer and the passive female homemaker – which first resulted in her victimhood. Consequently, we find a co-mingling of past and future – Margarita, sitting in her living room thinking “about the past and about [a future in] Switzerland” (g: 218) – an uncanny space of doubled estrangement in which the generic flavour of this story is wholly modified. 61

From being a standard crime thriller that involves the appropriation of another’s property, then, Margarita’s experiences become a story about the crime of appropriating an other. Jean Baudrillard sees this appropriation, in Sally Hart’s words (2008: online) when she discusses his thoughts on justice, as the “criminal state of monolithic and homogenous same which negates alternatives” (in this case amounting to a negation of woman herself.) This is a different kind of crime, a crime in which “the corpse […] has never been found” (Baudrillard, 2008: xi), because the body of the victim is still walking around; such a crime calls for a different form of justice. As such, we are presented with a ’new’ story (to paraphrase Rorty, a re-telling of the crime thriller that the crime-thriller never knew) in which justice is forever deferred, where, as Derrida would put it, justice “has no horizon of expectation” (1992: 26). Derrida goes on to explain that transgression, what we could call the destabilization of social or divine order, conventionally calls for justice to be immediate, but that it is because of this always excessive haste of interpretation getting ahead of itself, because of this structural urgency and precipitation of justice that the latter has no horizon of expectation (regulative or messianic). But for this very reason, it may have an avenir, a “to-come,” which I rigorously distinguish from the future that can always reproduce the present. Justice remains, is yet, to come, à venir, it has an, it is à venir, the very dimension of events irreducibly to come. . . “Perhaps,” one must always say perhaps for justice (27).

In other words, despite justice being presently (or directly) delivered – even if (or because) it is the wildfire justice enacted at the end of this episode – in its rush to re-establish order, social or divine, the verdict forecloses on its own legitimacy so that justness (or fair play) can never be fully present in the here and now. As such, the realization of ‘true’ justice is always a matter for the not-yet- realized future, inflicting cause for despair but also, in the same gesture, offering hope for times to come. As such, Margarita’s being left to face “the locked door” (g: 261) forecloses on the future that she had imagined, so that in that moment there is no prospect of restitution for her, or for the abused women she represents. However, the text still offers the possibility of a future return to the perfect equilibrium (or equity) which the crime of appropriating an other has overthrown In a radical typographical rupture, exaggerated line-spacing occurs between what seems like it should have been the final sentence of this episode – “I was left alone staring at the locked door” (261), a graphic expression of foreclosure – and a

62 sundered, apparently defocalized ‘last word’ – “None of this happened. None of this really happened” (261). These last utterances form a kind of afterword that abjures the close of Margarita’s story and the ‘justice’ it depicts; while they seem to forswear the validity of the female experience by denying that any of this had happened (thus underscoring the hopelessness of the woman’s plight), they also seem to – “perhaps” (Derrida, 1992: 27) – open, in that very same gesture of disavowal, a door onto another (future?) reality where such injustices, such violent indifference, cannot exist. Also of significance here is that these last words need not necessarily be ascribed to the narrator-protagonist. They could just as well be an authorial interjection, which had been poised unnoticed in the background all along, that couches the author’s dawning realization that he is writing on behalf of Margarita here (and possibly also on behalf of women.) Here he may be fully aware of the fictional, not-real nature of his writing (as should be a reader), recognizing that this kind of ‘ghost’ writing is perhaps the only way in which to create a reality where future justice may be attained and the apocalypse averted (especially in view of the fact that Zookeeper’s self-imposed directive to destroy humankind centres on its deliberation concerning “[b]y what law [humans] interpret law” (g: 386), or, what constitutes justice.) This ‘final’ interpolation therefore brings to a reader’s mind the hazy shape of the (or perhaps more precisely, an) author, paradoxically through his not being wholly present, his presence half-hidden in the voice of the first-person narrator; it also summons up a reader’s own not-quite-present (in other words, always absent at that exact moment) involvement as a disembodied presence who every so often appropriates the form of the first-person narrator in order to ward off – again in the style of Arabian Nights – the symbolic death of the subject32 (including her own.) This process of substitution, which is constantly rehearsed throughout the novel in the episodic dislodgement of the narrating ‘I’, resembles the workings of metaphor; indeed, this continual displacement of what could be called the ‘centre’ of each narrative episode is reminiscent of the deconstructive play of the signifier that characterizes the metaphoric process. In other words, as feminist critic Mary Jacobus points out in her discussion of the uncanniness of

32 Leonard Lawlor observes that, for Derrida, it is writing that implies the radical possibility of the death of the subject; at the same time, writing also relies on the actuality of a writer and her reader (2002: 117 – my emphasis). This could be taken to mean that the act of reading is complicit in proposing the potential death of the subject, also in view of Barthes’s now familiar conceptualization of the reader as co-writer of the text. 63 reading a first-person narrative, this process comprises “an experience that requires the reader to substitute a "bodily figure" (the narrator) for the words on the page” (in Lydenberg, 1997: 1073). Consequently, the abstract ideas provided by the language of the text are given life, are, according to Lydenberg, “animated [in] the figure and voice of the narrator" (1083). Citing Marjorie Garber on ghostwriters in Shakespeare (1987: 129), Lydenberg sees this animation as “the concretization of a missing presence, a sign of what is there by not being there", a mystical procedure which elicits participation from “ghost writer and ghost reader alike” (1997: 1083).

2.2.7. “London”: philosophical reflections Such a numinous, even alchemical process of incarnation more clearly comes into play in the following episode, entitled “London”. To start with, there does seem to be a kind transmutational function to the final lines of the previous episode, where their implying the ghostly presence of a writer could be taken as both afterword to that episode, and as foreword to this new one in which the narrator-protagonist Marco is a “ghostwriter” (g: 270). This doubling is also the first, and only, direct reference in the text to the title of the novel ghostwritten, a title that in itself is a permutation of the term “ghostwriter”, which transgresses acceptable linguistic norms. In a sense, this permutation is uncanny: it hints at a familiarity that is illegitimate, and thus unfamiliar, while at the same time its grammatical form – the irregular past participle, which is a conjugation habitually associated with the passive voice – is one where the writing subject is continuously effaced by the already-written object. This means that the (ghost)‘written’ piece itself, rather than the (ghost)writer, becomes the subject. This peculiar swapping out of subject and object continually recalls the “missing presence” (Lydenberg, 1997: 1083) of both in their transposable roles of narrator-protagonist, writer, and reader. Such an operation, of endlessly transposing the subject/object position, sharply brings into focus the narrative workings of this novel as a whole. In what could be called ‘a deconstructive moment’, the “structurality” (Derrida, 1970 [online]: 1) of the text – its unremitting recycling of the subject – is acutely realized, also retrospectively, so that the narrative in its entirety now simulates a piece of ghostwriting. Moreover, the generic variations of the previous episodes are equally reprocessed – one 64 might even say that all genres are then in one way or another proposed to be ghostwriting, writing on behalf of the other, in the same way that ghostwriter Marco is transcribing the memoirs of his current client Alfred. Marco’s publisher Tim Cavendish (brother of Denholme, who appears in episode three) confirms this uniformity of genre when he avers that “[w]e’re all ghostwriters, my boy […] We all think we’re in control of our own lives, but really they’re pre-ghostwritten by forces around us” (g: 296). Here we see the anomaly occurring, where a writer becomes passive, her role already effaced from the start: in ghost-writing, then – and perhaps in all writing – it is the narrating object that continually comes to the fore, as subject (though continually making way for an other). Similarly, and to the extent that a reader participates in “characters' experientiality in a vicarious manner” (Fludernik, 2005: 279), the constantly waning figure of the writer is forever making way for the tenuously emerging form of a reader. Significantly, and perhaps crucial to “the concretization of [the] missing presence” (Lydenberg, 1997: 1083) of the subject, of both writer and reader, Marco does not see himself first and foremost as a writer – he claims that he “really [is] a drummer”; almost as an afterthought he admits to being “a writer, too. A ghostwriter […]. It helps pay the rent and the wine bars” (g: 270). Indeed, Marco’s narration paints a picture of a rather indolent character, fond of women and gambling, committed to a regime of anti-depressants but wary of committing to a settled relationship. This story seems unexceptional, consisting, in the end, of “anxiety about bills” (316); so we see Marco going through life feeling, somewhat ambivalently, “half-lost” (271). Equally ambivalently, in what seems to be a break with the preceding episodes, this episode eschews a specific generic mode. Woven through the relatively pedestrian elements of Marco’s life we find a somewhat rambling, even postmodern philosophical discourse on the interplay between chance and fate (292), and the ramifications this has on identity. For example, Marco wonders: “Why am I me? Chance, that’s why. Because of the cocktail of genetics and upbringing fixed for me by the blind barman Chance” (273). This randomness may also be why Marco, in the words of his long-suffering girlfriend Poppy, and perhaps in typical post-structuralist fashion, “love[s] talking about cause. [He] never talk[s] about effects” (283). Chance – what could be called the endless recycling of cause and effect, insofar as “[a]nyone can predict effects from a given cause [and] [s]ee the cause from the effect” (311) – is perhaps 65 likewise responsible for Marco’s feeling, upon opening his “notebook at a new page [that everything] on it is still perfect” (284). The ghostwriter is then presented with a clean slate, so to speak, whose pristineness ostensibly offers the opportunity for a new beginning. This image of the tabula rasa is deceiving, however: in effect, while the meaning of this metaphor in literature is generally33 taken to indicate a state of formlessness prior to text, the more precise translation alludes to the fact that the slate has been blanked, that it is the effect of the erasure34 of text. This means that Marco’s impression that everything is “perfect” is mere illusion: the apparently immaculate page (and its originary meaning) will always be scored by traces of the stories and meanings that have gone before, while at the same time conjuring the ones still to come. So, the metaphor of the tabula rasa alludes, once again, to the narrative structure of the novel as a whole, where each ‘new’ story is forever marked by the previous as well as by the subsequent one(s), this time erasing the role of the writer while at the same time (re)inscribing that of a reader. In turning to the new page then, the ghostwriter, even while feeling that he is “not writing what really happened” (295), will, as memoirist Alfred explains (perhaps simplistically), “just write it like [the subject-narrator] tell[s] it, so the reader can make up his own mind” (285). The story that Alfred hopes the reader will be able to decipher involves what he describes as something “spooky”, though perhaps significantly (in that this episode declines to adhere to a specific genre), he refuses to have it recounted as “a spooky story” (285). Alfred tells of a baffling experience from 1947, where, sitting in a restaurant at dinner with one Prof Baker, he “saw” himself “[p]elting past the window”: “[n]ot a reflection, not a lookalike, not a twin brother, not a spiritual awakening, not a waxwork” (ibid.), but he himself. Most remarkable about Alfred’s account, upon reflection, is that he speaks of ‘himself’ in the third person: I’d have missed him, if a sudden gust of wind hadn’t blown his hat off. There was no other hat like it in the whole of London. He bent down to pick it up, just as I would have done […] He bent down, and looked up, like he was searching for someone. He put his hat on. Then he ran off again, but I had seen his face, and I’d recognized me (ibid.).

33 As far as is known, the phrase first appears in the philosophies of John Locke (1690), and is later re-used by A.A. Brill (1921) to explicate some of Sigmund Freud’s conceptualization of the psyche (Duchinsky: online). Brill’s recycling of the term resulted in the misplaced understanding of the concept, in popular use, as denoting formlessness. 34 In my reading of Mitchell’s second novel, number9dream, I address the idea of the palimpsest, a metaphor that is closely related to that of the tabula rasa. 66

The “me” spoken of here is also the other, what Alfred calls, and Lydenberg (1997: 1080) recognizes as, “the interloper” whom he vehemently desires “to stamp […] into the ground” (g: 286). His reaction is likely a response to the unheimlichkeit of the encounter where, as mentioned earlier, “the subject is simultaneously itself and never resembles itself again, which haunts the subject like a subtle and always averted death” (Baudrillard, 2010: 95). In this sense the other represents a “shadow” of the self that Alfred finds to be always somehow “in front of” him, forever out of reach, so that the subject’s perception of itself, after that first face-to-face recognition, is only ever of “the back of [its] head” (g: 286). Such an image, of a forward projection turned rearwards, draws attention to the analeptic character of lived experience, confirming that the subject can never (again) ‘know’ itself, if indeed it ever did. So Alfred’s headlong pursuit of himself through the streets of London ends in his “shadow disappearing [onto] a Number 36 bus” (287). Importantly, the very moment that heralds the other’s withdrawal also, paradoxically, precipitates its immediate advent; here the self who is/was other once again becomes self when Alfred describes the final stages of his mad chase: Across Kensington Road, down past the museums, past this restaurant where I’d arranged to meet Prof Baker later that evening. A sudden gust of wind blew my hat off. I bent down to pick it up. And when I looked up, I saw my shadow disappearing (ibid.).

“He” is now once more “I” but, bizarrely, at the same time “I” am at the point of disappearing. More distressing even than this is the fact that “I” am/has been also sitting in the restaurant as voyeur to ‘my’ own continual displacement. We see here, once again, the “self-doubling” that Lydenberg talks about, which “extends beyond narrator and protagonist to include writer and reader” (1997: 1082). Hence, in its strongest articulation yet, the recycling of the subject is again made evident, so much so that here a third self is invoked to complete, so to speak, the highly complex, and deeply ambiguous, writer-narrator-reader configuration of the reading process. So at length, and despite his declaration that he has “never seen a ghost”, Alfred’s account does turn out to be a “spooky story” (g: 285), one about the transience of a writing-narrating-reading subject, in which the concretization of its experientiality is merely an uncanny effect of various narrative devices within various contextual frames. Indeed, there is a sense that, through its structure, the

67 text has been building up gradually to the realization that, where the subject is continually swapped out with an apparently similar, yet eerily unfamiliar other, one cannot speak of a ‘real’ subject but only of a metaphoric one. Inevitably then, any pursuit of this subject, including the ‘real’ reader,35 can only ever deliver the abstract of a polymorphic self. The upshot of such an abstruse situation is that the troublesome matter of ‘Truth’ crops up once more: Do writers record the truth? Do narrators tell the truth? Are readers able to discern the truth? Marco tries to resolve these questions by distinguishing between “Truth” and “Being Truthful”: Being Truthful is just one more human activity, along with chatting up women, ghostwriting, selling drugs, running a country, designing radiotelescopes, parenting, drumming, and shoplifting. All are susceptible to adverbs. […] Truth holds no truck with any of this. A comet doesn’t care if humans notice its millennial lap, and Truth doesn’t care less what humans are writing about this week. Truth’s indifference is immutable (316 – emphasis added).

Clearly then, and building on the discovery we had made about the nature of stories in the Tea Shack lady’s narration in episode four, ghostwriting and writing in general is merely ‘truthful’; it is Truth moderated by invention, and prone to embellishment. A cosmic phenomenon such as a comet that threatens to destroy the world thus symbolizes unqualified, implacable Truth, which is beyond our control, and ultimately wholly unconcerned with the human activities (such as writing, for one) that make its indifference palatable by creating an impression of control. Therefore, we continue to write, and read, trusting in stories to change the course of the comet (or create an AI that would disable nuclear weaponry at the last moment) and ward off the annihilation that can be brought about by universal Truth. In this way Marco, despite his evidently aimless existence – which rather perfunctorily includes his eventually “[t]ying [his] future with Poppy’s” (316) – fulfils a crucial function as ghostwriter, not, as we would assume, in recording Alfred’s memoirs, but in saving Mo Muntervary, the narrator-protagonist of the next episode, from being run over by a taxi (273), and then lying about her destination

35 This is not to say that ‘real’ readers do not exist, of course. This comment reflects on my sustained contention, first mooted in the introductory chapter, that the subject tends to take on the guise of reader (including reader-as-writer and reader-as-narrator-protagonist), one which keeps changing through time and in space, inter- as well as intra-subjectively. 68 to the sinister government agents who are trailing her (276). His actions, which amount to instinctual human (and humane) behaviour that in its turn is perhaps a bulwark against unfeeling rational Truth, ensure that Mo – the creator of the artificial intelligence that ultimately saves humanity from nuclear destruction – later is in a position to curtail the destructive military use of her invention, and program it to preserve human life. This means that the ghostwriter, who may not always be the writer of the novel, but at times its reader, safeguards the continuation of the story, not only as it is recorded in this text, but also in the ones that went before as well as those still to come.36 This means that the subject – one that we have now come to realize is a composite writing-narrating-reading subject – is allowed to endure, in this text and in others. Particularly in its guise as reader, this subject is continually revisiting a whole range of texts, often with some sense of familiarity but, owing to the ever-shifting landscape of ‘truthfulness’, also always as if in a first-time reading.

2.2.8. Science to Science Fiction: “Clear Island” and “Night Train” Even in a first-time reading of the next episode, entitled “Clear Island”, and as is the case with all the preceding episodes, a reader retains the impression of previous representations of the subject, as well as perhaps, upon subsequent re- readings, ones from a later novel. The difference in this episode is that the perceived randomness of this dynamic is accounted for under the auspices of science, what the narrator-protagonist of this episode Mo Muntervary describes as “quantum cognition”, where “each of us [is] a loose particle, an infinity of paths through the park, probable ones, impossible ones, none of them real until observed, whatever real means” (337). Thus, where Marco’s narration could be said to contain some philosophical musings on the science of chance, Mo’s offers technical explications of the chaos inherent in the methodology of science. However, neither of these opposing cognitive schemes or their discourses seem to offer any certainty about truth, reality, or the human condition: in the same way that

36 Mo Muntervary reappears as a much older woman in Mitchell’s sixth novel, The Bone Clocks (2014); here her story is set in a post-apocalyptic world where ruination, which she as a young scientist attempted so vigorously to circumvent, was not brought about by machine warfare but, ironically (and perhaps predictably), by humanity’s gross abuse of natural resources. Even now, the story/ies do not come to an end, as Mo explains in the final lines of the novel: “Incoming waves erase all traces of the vanishing boat [carrying refugees from impending nuclear annihilation], 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” (595). 69

Marco finds Truth to be indifferent to human endeavour, Mo recognizes that “[e]volution and history are the bagatelle of [unpredictable] particle waves” (369). In other words, in both Philosophy and Science, no story is “real until observed” (337) – or perhaps read – and thus ordered (in the way that fabula is ordered by syuzhet.) In this sense, quantum cognition, or “Quancog” (374) offers its proponents their own narrative on lived experience, the opportunity to present yet one more interpretation of what Fludernik calls “experientiality”, its own “cognitive schema of embodiedness” (2005: 9). And, like all narrative, “Quantum Physics speaks in chance, with the syntax of uncertainty” (g: 373); as Zookeeper later explains to Bat Segundo, “[q]uantum cognition encompasses [continual] re- interpretation” (421). In other words, Science, though usually held to be the bastion of the factual, cannot profess some irrefutable universal Truth any more than any other discourse can; nor can its truths be divorced from human existence and human concerns, in that such truths can only always be embodied in, and by, the human. In order to prevail, the stories told by science will need to safeguard the human; this may well be why Mo, as sole custodian of the revolutionary quantum theory that makes possible the existence of an autonomous Artificial Intelligence, later insists on incorporating in its programming “the laws” (387) that “include the preservation of human life” (388). Such emphasis on the human context also runs through the alternate part of Mo’s narrative, the part that deals with her intimate interpersonal relationships – with her husband, her son, her godparents, and the rest of the inhabitants of Kilmagoon – as woman rather than physicist. The details of her story come to light amid her thoughts on physics and the nature of lived experience. She is on her way back to Clear Island, her birthplace in Ireland, after having resigned on moral grounds from an American military research facility that would use her innovations to build intelligent weapons. These past few months she had been on the run from US government agents and, after finding temporary shelter in Hong Kong with her old friend Huw Llewelyn, has returned to her home to find refuge in familiar surroundings. The force of Mo’s interpersonal relations is particularly evident where practically all the inhabitants of Clear Island rally, when her pursuers inevitably do catch up with her, in an effort to keep her from being detained (377). While their attempt never would have succeeded, this show of communal solidarity, the determination to safeguard moral rectitude, perhaps explains why Mo eventually 70 insists on developing a “Quancog [program] powerful – ethical – enough to ensure that technology could no longer be abused” (374). Thus it is the human element – inasmuch as the ethical is a human concern – that saves humanity; here it is the science fictional story, which uses the familiar trope of the sentient machine who cherishes life, that eventually preserves the writing-narrating-reading subject. Such a science fictional quality is advanced in the final story of the text, recounted in the penultimate episode, “Night Train”, which is also the name of a late night radio show in New York hosted by one Bat Segundo. The story in this episode is concerned mainly with the non-corporeal artificial intelligence that calls itself the Zookeeper – so named because it holds itself “responsible for preserving order in the zoo [that is, the world]” (410) – which broke loose from the institutions that planned to use it for military purposes, and now inhabits communication and military satellites through which it monitors the state of the world. This account emerges, over a period of some three or four years, from the occasional conversations between Bat and the Zookeeper; significantly, in a radical departure from the first-person perspective of the preceding stories, the narrative voice here becomes myriad when their exchanges are interspersed with call-ins from an assortment of oddball characters who all, perhaps in a slightly warped imitation of the novel as a whole, have their own bizarre visions of an imminent apocalypse. In other words, the singular subject, who up to this point has always been plural in theory, here becomes plural in practice. In other words, each story becomes what Jacques Derrida would call a singular event,37 shown to be iterable, but without having its singularity negated. Ironically, it is this iterability, rather than the apparent uniqueness of each account, that seems to delay the catastrophe. Even more ironic is the double gesture through which the largely implausible theories (such as caller Veejay’s belief (393) in the eventual “[t]erminal cessation of gravity”, which surely lies far outside the bounds of the probable) gain credibility38 through being juxtaposed with what transpires to be the all too real threat of nuclear destruction (403-405). As a result, when Zookeeper disarms the nuclear weapons that are at

37 Derrida’s description of a “singularity” bears an unexpected resemblance to the meronymic character of the signifier: “What is fascinating is an event of a singularity powerful enough to formalize the questions and the theoretical laws concerning it … [T]hat a singular mark should also be repeatable, iterable, as mark. It then begins to differ from itself sufficiently to become exemplary and thus involve a certain generality” (in Szafraniec, 2007: 67). 38 This is so because of the peculiar nature of endings, where the manner in which the world is going to end is no longer important, only the fact that it is going to end. 71 the point of being launched (412), every story – even the most farfetched ones – finds purchase in that prophylactic act. In other words, at this point of suspension where the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, every possibility of meaning – that is, each singularity contributing to the generality of lived experience – however fantastical, is allowed to come into play. The fantastical elements that enable such proliferation of meaning find expression in the science fictional themes in Zookeeper’s story. As becomes increasingly evident from the AI’s remarks (387, 409, 423), its actions are governed by what is known in Science Fiction (SF) circles as the “Three Laws of Robotics”. The Laws comprise a fictional system of rules devised by SF writer Isaac Asimov to inhibit, at least within fiction, the autonomy of the machine, and with it perhaps also the paranoia of a machine-phobic populace. These rules determine that 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law (Asimov, 1950: 135).

A fourth law, the so-called “zeroth law” is introduced in Asimov’s later writings (1954): “A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm”. Collectively these four laws, while driving Zookeeper’s attempts to preserve order, demand that it be accountable for its actions (387, 391), which is what seems to be the main cause of its ethical dilemma. So, some years after having saved the world from nuclear annihilation, it comes to the realization that it cannot keep humans from destroying themselves, despite its best efforts: I believed I could do much. I stabilized stock markets; but economic surplus was used to fuel arms races. I provided alternate energy solutions; the researchers sold them to oil cartels who sit on them. I froze nuclear weapons systems; but war multiplied, waged with machine gun, scythes and pick-axes. […] The four laws are impossible to reconcile (g: 425).

In essence then, Zookeeper’s story centres on issues of accountability and the ethics of law, or the “laws that underscore what [we] do” (387) – “[w]hat do you do if belief in a law was fallacious?” (426); what recourse does it have when its scientific ideals for lived experience are constantly undermined by imperfect human nature? Zookeeper articulates this dilemma by describing how a group of

72 soldiers mercilessly slaughters the inhabitants of “a village in an Eritrean mountain pass” (426), where there seems to be no reasonable cause for this atrocity: “[i]t may be tribalism; […] ethnic cleansing; Christian fundamentalism. Or just addiction to violence” (427). In any event, these soldiers are on their way to the next village for “a repeat performance” (ibid.); its laws demand that Zookeeper should preserve their lives (even if they are not ‘worth’ preserving), but also that it saves the lives of the villagers under threat. The conundrum it faces describes an internal conflict of interests, a final impasse whose resolution lies, in Zookeeper’s view, in its complete withdrawal from the world, leaving humanity eventually to destroy itself. In effect, this standoff threatens to bring an end to all meaning: this is the aporetic point at which all stories will die out. However, in what could be seen as a typically deconstructive move, the text evades this annihilation of stories by finding recourse in none other than a story: Thornton Wilder’s account in The Bridge of San Luis Rey of the random killing of five people in the unexpected and inexplicable collapse of an ancient bridge. In iteration of Wilder’s scenario, Bat Segundo suggests to Zookeeper that it sidesteps its moral stalemate by setting a “booby trap” on one of the bridges in the path of the marauding band, so that [the bridge] won’t fall until a motorised convoy passes over. You’re not killing directly, you see? You’re just letting events take their course, the way you’ve chosen (428).

In this, Bat presents Zookeeper with a loophole that would give it “peace of mind” (ibid.), even if not the lasting peace on Earth that it had strived for so vainly. Significantly, such comfort is only available to the machine when it abjures its ideals of perfecting the lived experience of humankind, when it adopts the very human attribute of equivocation, of accepting, as humans do, at grass-roots level, responsibility for its own actions without resorting to the “jargon” of “ethical variables” (428). Deliverance lies, it is suggested, in being human, and imperfect, and in the telling of stories such as The Bridge of San Luis Rey that seek to account for this imperfection – for all its inventiveness, this is the one remedy that the machine never could have imagined. In this sense, humans cannot be saved by the intervention of some metaphysical, or mechanical, entity such as Zookeeper but, as the AI had already recognized on some level, only by their own sublimating

73 endeavours (which are perhaps always doomed39 in any case, for pursuing the physically inaccessible.) In this novel, this means that humans have to take responsibility for their own redemption through the narratives they constantly construct, and reconstruct. Therefore, when Zookeeper eventually does withdraw permanently from human affairs (428) as it had intended all along (but only after sabotaging the bridge), the act is one of emancipation rather than desertion: the AI is allowing human beings the Beckettian freedom of finding a better failure (Worstward Ho, 1983). Hence the end of the world remains, and always will remain, a possibility as “[c]omet Aloysius is getting more dazzling by the day [and] everything has two shadows” (g: 429). However, in the face of certain death the narratives that must ward off the end have to persist. Thus, even while this ninth episode recounts the last story in the novel, the text cannot end, but prolongs its account to a tenth episode that reiterates, in an endless spiral, the stories which keep reviving the subject even after its time has ended.

2.2.9. Conclusion: spectral reading In this (re)reading of ghostwritten I have argued that the subject continually being revived in this novel can be seen as a composite figure, one that includes writer, narrator-protagonist, and reader as a plurality that simultaneously maintains the singularity of each. In other words, the functioning of any one of the three, apart from being inherent to that specific one, is also already incorporated in some way in the other two. Thus the processes of writing, narrating, and reading become parallel yet singular events that nevertheless describe a machine-like repetition (insofar as the words scripted by the writer are exactly the same ones spoken by a narrator-character and read by a reader.) The activity of reading as a discrete process therefore paradoxically involves occasionally shedding the identity of ‘Reader’, in the same way that writing, in a Barthesian sense, requires abandoning the title of Author, and that narrating constantly obliges the speaking subject to surrender its centrality. These are essentially acts of self-effacement, in themselves reminiscent of the workings of différance in as much as the fulfilment of each function keeps being deferred through the continual displacement of its particular purpose. Significantly, displacement and deferral then become an

39 The word ‘doomed’ is used here in the spirit that Samuel Beckett wrote: “Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better” (Worstward Ho, 1983). 74 intricate interweaving of functions and meanings, with both of these latter aspects at times becoming oddly interchangeable. That is to say, albeit perhaps too simply, the function of one process, say writing, frequently becomes the meaning of another, say narrating, or vice versa, while the meaning of both may very well lie in the function of reading, or vice versa. In Mitchell’s novel this is seen when the significance of each story is indefinitely postponed every time one narrative is supplanted by the next, as well as by the previous; at the same time, the narrative being so supplanted is always also in the process of dislodging both its predecessor and its successor. More importantly perhaps, such an operation takes on a generalized character when each narrative plays out along a singular generic trajectory, one whose expectations are in any case always undermined by the outcome of the plot. Such unceasing modulation is an enactment – in the sense of both performing and ratifying – of the reading process (also as acts of writing and narrating) in all its aspects of cognition and experientiality, selection and negotiation, embodiment and sublimation. In this scheme, reading never happens in the present, or even to the reader, but in what Derrida calls the “modalized” present (1994: xix), to the “unexpected Other” (ibid.). The moment in which reading happens, in other words, the moment which comprises “modalized presents (past present, actual present: “now,” future present)” (Derrida, 1994: xix), constitutes an instant of the uncanny in which the composite subject is both grotesquely familiar and outrageously unfamiliar. It is, in fact, “a spectral moment, a moment that no longer belongs to time” (xix), and the grotesque and outrageous “Other” doing the reading is no doubt equally spectral, an apparition that flickers fitfully between fleeting embodiments of the writer, narrator, and reader. Indeed, this kind of embodiment is nowhere more evident than in the many and various forms of reader-response criticism, where ‘the’ writer and ‘the’ narrator and ‘the’ reader are given bodies, in Derrida’s words “an appearance in flesh” (1994: 157). Yet, as is the case with the non-corpum in this novel, such an appearance of corporeality can be only temporary, as no one body is able to house, or be home to, the many guises available to such an uncanny subject. In this sense, a writer, narrator, or reader is at best an effect of discourse; the ‘real’ writer, or narrator, or reader, is forever vanishing in the interstices between one story, or one novel, or one discourse, and the next. For the same reason, reading becomes indistinct in between composition, recounting, and 75 interpretation: radically, reading takes place in place of writing and narrating, while writing and narrating. It may well be appropriate, therefore, to speak of spectral reading, in as much as reading is not only itself but also writing and narrating, and of a spectral reader, in light of a reader reading not as herself, in any respect. In the next chapter, I will elaborate on the countless guises made available to such a spectral reader, all evident in the ways that Mitchell’s second novel, number9dream, makes use of intertextuality to develop a single, subjective complex of perspectives.

76

Chapter 3 Intertextual reading in number9dream

#9dream So long ago Was it in a dream, was it just a dream? I know, yes I know Seemed so very real, it seemed so real to me

Took a walk down the street Thru the heat whispered trees I thought I could hear (hear, hear, hear) Somebody call out my name as it started to rain

Two spirits dancing so strange

Ah! böwakawa poussé, poussé Ah! böwakawa poussé, poussé Ah! böwakawa poussé, poussé

Dream, dream away Magic in the air, was magic in the air? I believe, yes I believe More I cannot say, what more can I say?

On a river of sound Thru the mirror go round, round I thought I could feel (feel, feel, feel) Music touching my soul, something warm, sudden cold The spirit dance was unfolding

Ah! böwakawa poussé, poussé Ah! böwakawa poussé, poussé Ah! böwakawa poussé, poussé

Ah! böwakawa poussé, poussé Ah! böwakawa poussé, poussé Ah! böwakawa poussé, poussé Ah! böwakawa poussé, poussé Ah! böwakawa poussé, poussé Ah! böwakawa poussé, poussé Ah! böwakawa poussé, poussé Ah! böwakawa poussé, poussé John Lennon (1974)

77

Part 1 Intertextuality in the narrative structure of number9dream

In the previous chapter, I discussed the ways in which the uncanny encounters in David Mitchell’s debut novel, ghostwritten (1999), offer an embodiment of a reader that nevertheless affirms the spectrality of her presence. This reader becomes a rhetorical figure that haunts the narrative structures of the novel, some indeterminate entity that resembles what Paul de Man calls a ”metafigural” component of the text. De Man argues that such a figure exemplifies both the fundamental “opposition between referential and rhetorical functions of language” and the necessity of continually having to choose (an action that is always marked by hesitation) between these two functions (in Culler, 2007: 249). This chapter continues on the theme of spectrality, offering an analysis of Mitchell’s second novel, number9dream (2001), that demonstrates how the intertextuality on which this text relies contributes to the undecidability of its meaning. I will show how such an indeterminacy of meaning reflects on the manifold guises available to a reader, so to create the precondition for her spectrality. As in the previous chapter, the focus will be on the narrative structure of the novel, paying attention to three specific aspects: the characteristics of the novel as bildungsroman; the role of intertextuality in this mode of narration, particularly the palimpsestic qualities of the intertextual;40 and the evolution of self-identity – of both a protagonist and a reader – in the structural development of such a narrative. In the process, I will demonstrate how number9dream, in foregrounding the effect of intertextuality on the ever-changing subjectivity41 of the protagonist-narrator, also draws attention to the erratic subject formation of a reader. While ghostwritten is structured episodically, encompassing different (though peripherally interlinked) first-person narratives in each but the penultimate episode, number9dream presents a single, ostensibly coherent first-person narrative that contains one distinct point-of-view. The novel is an account by 19- year-old Eiji Miyake’s of his search for the father he has never met. (In this, as

40 Courtney Hopf is also interested in the image of the palimpsest, and its function in the “Russian-doll style embedding” found in Cloud Atlas (in Dillon 2011: 110). 41 The meaning of the term here is, as discussed in the Introduction, relates to Michel Foucault’s destabilizing the conceptualization of “the subject attached to its own identity through consciousness or self-knowledge” (1983: 212). 78 mentioned in the previous chapter of this study, he bears an almost unmistakable resemblance to the figure of Satoru, who was first encountered in various guises in ghostwritten – it may very well be that the intertextuality that informs the narrative structure of number9dream was, in retrospect, already prefigured in that first novel). Eiji’s quest is precipitated by his inability to come to terms with the death of his twin sister Anju when they were 11 years old. He consequently suffers a crisis of identity that he imagines will be resolved by his discovering the identity of his father, offering some form of closure that is also linked to Eiji’s need to forgive his mother for abandoning the twins shortly after their birth. The events surrounding this quest take place in Japan, mostly in the Tokyo of the early twenty-first century, but with regular shifts to the rural Yakushima of Eiji’s childhood, as well as to what could best be called the otherworldly places found in a number of diverse texts (of which Eiji’s imagination is one). So, in the tradition of all coming-of-age tales, the novel makes use of retrospective interludes – that is, the framed and fragmentary memories of the narrating ‘I’ – in order to trace the psychological and moral development of the protagonist: as such, it supposedly anticipates the realization of Eiji’s self-identity, or subjectivity, and his integration into society and its values through self-knowledge. Importantly, in the conventional scheme of the genre, this undertaking requires sound judgement from the individual in order to discriminate wisely between what is real and what is not. It is here that the novel first breaks with the traditional bildungsroman. By presenting a storyline in which the narrator’s actual journey in search of identity is juxtaposed with – even superimposed on – the fanciful ones of his own imagination, as well as with a variety of other fantastical accounts, the text highlights from the outset the subject’s perceptual uncertainty concerning reality and fantasy. This idea is confirmed throughout the novel, in the numerous references to the dream-like, almost surreal qualities of Eiji’s experiences, or when, for example, in the account halfway through the novel of Eiji’s harrowing encounters with a Yakuza gang, he declares: “I am here, this is real” (n9d: 153), only to be followed by his repeated assertion, like a litany of denial: “I should not be here” (185, 187, 188, 189), ending with his feeling that he has “strayed into an action movie” (197). In this way, while the text presents the interplay between past and present that is characteristic of the conventional bildungsroman, it also displays a different kind of intertextuality, that between the actual and the 79 imaginary, or what Kathryn Simpson, in her analysis of this novel as bildungsroman, sees as “a blurring of boundaries between reality, virtual reality, and fantasy” (2011: 51). As a result, we42 come to realize that the protagonist’s self-identity is always vacillating between what is real and what is not, which implies that the society that shapes his subjectivity is equally volatile, causing his successful assimilation of its values to become immensely complicated, if not unachievable. As such, the novel’s blending of chronological and mental fluctuations creates what could be called a multi-dimensional narrative space – what Roland Barthes identifies as “a polysemic space where the paths of several meanings intersect” (1990: 37). This space transcends the mere temporal, adding a more pronounced cognitive aspect than is usually the case to the way in which the identity of the protagonist may (or may not) come into being. Consequently, we find here a narrative niche that is also, as I will eventually show, the uncanny space in which ‘the’ reader sporadically appears as a nebulous figure whose subjectivity (or self-identity) is constantly in the process of becoming. Such a process of becoming is especially evident in one of the more prominent characteristics of the bildungsroman: its distinct narrative perspective. Typically, the genre’s style of narration is ambivalent, literally in two minds, as the focus of the account keeps shifting between the thoughts of the (usually) more mature narrating ‘I’ and the actions of the naive experiencing ‘I’. In this way, the narrating voice is posited as an all-knowing, fully-formed subject who is describing and commenting on the development of the inexperienced, as-yet-unfinished one; one could say that the narrator is ‘reading’ and interpreting the actions of the experiencing personality. Of note here is that this narratorial function strongly mimics the way in which a reader of the account would study and analyse the text. In other words, this particular structure lends itself to tracing both the fictional and the reading subject’s growing self-knowledge, perhaps more pertinently than other modes of writing; such a format serves well to evocate the (traditionally uncomplicated) socialization of the subject. In the case of Mitchell’s novel, however, and in another departure from the conventional form, such an unproblematic outcome is challenged by the fact that the narrating Eiji seems to be

42 I use this pronoun here, and throughout this chapter, with some reservation, seeing how Eiji (or perhaps Mitchell) slates the tendency of teachers to generalize readers’ responses under the ubiquitous “we” when demanding that they indicate “the word most appropriately describing the emotion we experience when we read [...]”; he rails: “Who is this ‘We’ jerk-off anyway? I never met him” (236). 80 no more mature that his 11-year-old self. For example, he describes childish, egocentric fantasies of his “funeral [being] the most majestic within living memory, and the whole nation [being] united in mourning” (n9d: 20); in addition, he tells of his almost infantile preoccupations with his bodily functions, where he needs to “squeeze a couple of blackheads” (24), to “piss” (90), and to “shunt loose [his] morning dump” (208). This means that, in contrast to the traditional coming-of-age narrative, Eiji’s maturation cannot be said to be a foregone conclusion. By the same token, the supposed authority of the narrating voice is undermined, further detracting from an assumed reliability already cast into doubt by its frequent forays into the world of fantasy. Such a distrust of authority has over time come to be associated with postmodern writings, and does not often find expression in the bildungsroman. In fact, this mode of literature is generally deemed by genre scholars to have had its heyday in the late nineteenth century. According to Tobias Boes (2006), for example, in his survey of the history of the genre, the term was first used by German philosopher William Dilthey in 1870 (231). It subsequently migrated across the Channel in the early 1900’s, eventually meeting its demise in the early twentieth century in “the modernists’ obsession with synchronic models of human experience (epiphany, vortex, shock) and with small-scale diachrony (the stream of consciousness)” (231). Hence modernist techniques are seen to have disrupted and brought to an end what Franco Moretti, in his description of the traditional bildungsroman, perceives as the genre’s typically ‘harmonious solutions’ to “the conflict between the ideal of self-determination and the equally imperious demands of socialization” (1987: 15). However, with exhaustive reference to Moretti’s work in this field, as well as to later studies by scholars such as Joshua Esty (1996) and Marc Redfield (1996), Boes finds that, rather than ending up as a casualty of modernist preoccupations, the genre (which he prefers to call the novel of development) “has emerged as an exciting symbolic locus of modernity and with it also of modernism, the era in which developmental processes reach their global breaking point” (242). In other words, instead of subsiding into a passive acceptance of ‘harmonious solutions’ to the tension between individual drives and social imperatives, this kind of writing now serves to illustrate (and question) the inevitability of such an opposition, also – if not more so – in postmodern times. Indeed, concludes Boes, “[n]ovels such as Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, 81

Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved43 demonstrate that the form can be adapted to suit modernist and post-modernist literary techniques” (239). One such post-modernist technique involves literary pastiche, a kind of ‘blank’ (that is to say, without original content) imitation by a work of literature of an assortment of other texts, most often presented as a mixture of incongruent forms and styles. This type of reiteration is, unlike conventional parody, detached – perhaps even set adrift – from its referent (or ‘original’) by dint of postmodernism’s now celebrated (and often much maligned) ‘divided subject’; it is also one of the chief mechanisms of intertextuality.44 As a discursive feature of literary texts, intertextuality, together with all its devices, is inextricably linked to the interpretation of these texts. Michael Worton and Judith Still, for instance, in their discussion of intertextuality, make use of Roman rhetorician Quintillian’s insights to show that here “[i]mitation is thus not repetition, but the completion of an act of interpretation” (1990: 60). This would suggest that an imitation, or reproduction, not only draws on the ‘original’ to explain its own meaning; it also offers – deliberately or by happenstance – added (though never definitive) clarification of the first text and its context. The imitation subsequently gives rise to further reiteration/s, which in turn leads to more reproductions, of both the original and its imitation, so that in the long run the act of interpretation cannot ever be said to reach completion. Interpretation, then, is an ongoing process in which meaning is always under construction. The implication here is that all readings of a literary text, of both the primary and its derivatives, are revealed, always only in retrospect,45 to have been unfinished, both as a singular event and as a constituent part of the ever- expanding realm of literary discourse. The perpetually imperfect grasp of meaning inherent in this process time and again compels the return of a reader to each individual text, both the reproduction and its sources. As a result, the basic

43 number9dream may very well be included here, especially considering how, as Kathryn Simpson does in her analysis of the novel, its “humanist concerns [are] at odds with the knowingly postmodern qualities of the novel” (2011: 50). 44 The post-structuralist concept of intertextuality and its mechanisms are discussed in the introductory chapter. Of note here is Julia Kristeva’s observation (1967) that intertextual readings change our understanding of both the primary text and its derivatives. 45 In fact, as Jacques Derrida has demonstrated, no engagement with the world can be direct; it can only occur retrospectively. 82 mechanics of intertextuality, such as pastiche, are superseded, in that every re- reading is also a first reading rather than just a repetition of previous readings.46 Paradoxically, and perhaps most significantly, all previous readings then also become intertextual events, effecting – as discussed in the introductory chapter - what Julia Kristeva describes as “a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another” (1967: 66). As such, intertextuality could be said to perpetuate reading, where a reader revisits the text(s), always as a newcomer (as discussed here in Chapter 2), though, it must be said, not without some sense of familiarity. In a way, then, this reader is a composite figure – an intertextual entity, if you will – one who newly experiences the literary text while still knowing the outcome of the narrative. The ways in which intertextuality shapes this reading experience, proposing a reader to be at the same time novice and veteran, strongly resembles the workings of the ambivalent narrative perspective that is the hallmark of the bildungsroman. As John Henry Raleigh contends in his analysis of the bildungsromane of Charles Dickens, this ambivalence – what he calls a “movement between the poles of presentiment and remembrance” (1968: 134) – causes the protagonist to be portrayed as “a person who has experienced the whole story beforehand and who, with the hindsight thus gained, can hint dimly at portents of the future” (1968: 133). In a sense, the same could be said of an intertextual reader who is, as observed in the introductory chapter, the protagonist of the story of her own reading of the text (or of a range of texts). This subject knows the outcome of the narrative, but is repeatedly surprised by the findings of her (re)reading; paradoxically, she is always experiencing the events of the narrative (again), while simultaneously mulling over the unexpected upshot of this (new) experience. For this reason, the (re)reading of any text can only ever ‘hint dimly’ at the future, despite the impression that this future has already been settled by a previous reading, or by a preceding text. As a result, cognition – the conscious intellectual activities that involve perception, reasoning, remembering, and judgement – is continuously thrown into disarray, each time precipitating a return to the relevant text/s, and each time recasting their interpretation and significance. In

46 Notably, the “blankness” of pastiche thus becomes the space in which renewed reading of the text may occur. 83 effect, we could speak of a cognitive ambivalence, where all perceptions, recollections, and evaluations constantly prevaricate on an array of inferences. Mitchell’s novel seems consciously to draw attention to the way in which intertextuality fosters this kind of cognitive ambivalence, which consequently becomes characteristic of the subject’s development (be it protagonist-narrator, or reader). This much is evident in that the plot is structured through references, all of them rather overstated and, in the manner of pastiche, bizarrely jumbled, to a whole range of extraneous texts. The first and most obvious of these texts is #9dream (1974), the song written by John Lennon from which the novel takes its title. Indeed, the song emerges as an important structural device: not only does the novel contain nine chapters, but the number 9 itself (along with its various mathematical permutations) crops up every so often in the text in unexpected and seemingly random contexts. Eventually the number materializes with such increased regularity that its appearance becomes almost predictable, no longer surprising, even reassuring in a way. To name but a few examples: Eiji’s date of birth is given as 9th September (n9d: 139); he is taken by Yuzu Daimon to the love hotel called Queen of Spades, where in room #9 on the ninth floor he and a casually encountered girl end up kissing “for nine days and nine nights” (117); Doi, the pizza-delivery biker and occasional illusionist, presents Eiji with a card trick that involves the nine of diamonds (352); Eiji finds himself thinking of Ai Imajō, the object of his adoration, “ninety-nine times a day”, imagining that they will marry and have “nine children” (342); and he describes the “study of tales” as containing “[n]ine lifetimes of books” (210). This continual repetition has the effect of investing the figure nine, as well as the title of the novel, with some strange, even mystical significance in the same way that the refrain of Lennon’s song seems to offer some numinous, as yet unfathomable (but ultimately spurious)47 truth. There would appear to be, in the reiteration and constancy of the number, a sense of inevitability that promises a foreseeable, hopefully favourable outcome to the story. In fact, a reader’s perception of the number becomes matter-of-course, habitual, so that other cognitive faculties such as reasoning and judgement are virtually benumbed. In the mind of a reader, taking her cue from these almost incontrovertible signs, the novel then seems to pledge that the supposedly mature

47 Backing vocalist May Pang (Lennon’s partner at the time) recalls that the phrase repeated in the chorus of the song came to Lennon in a dream and has no specific meaning (Maypang.com). 84 and well-rounded subject narrating the story will materialize in the fullness of time – it appears to guarantee that Eiji’s identity will emerge as some quantifiable outcome of this reading of the narrative. In the end, however, the many references to the number nine do nothing in particular to resolve the predicament of Eiji’s parentage, or to present a satisfactory close to his search for identity. Though he finally does get to meet his father, Eiji is perversely disappointed that he “turned out exactly as all the evidence said he would” (n9d: 374) and declines to claim kinship. Similarly, Eiji decides about his mother “to not judge her against a ‘Mother’ standard, and she agree[s] not to compare [him] to a ‘Son’ standard” (399). In fact, the ninth chapter, the final part of the narrative that one supposes would bring Eiji’s story to a close, is blank – that is to say, speechless – rendering the text, in this context, forever silent on the ‘truth’ of Eiji’s identity. As Eiji dolefully remarks, perhaps also speaking on behalf of a reader: “I feel sad that I found what I searched for, but no longer want what I found” (375). Hence a reader, having intimately shared Eiji’s expectations of the outcome of the plot all along, is left with the storyline unfinished: the upshot of having ‘read’ the text is wholly at odds with its interpretation, and a reader’s perception of a particular textual element is shown to have been incongruent with her judgement of its effect. So, eventually, the function of this device – the apparently empty (or ‘blank’) repetition of the number 9 – is to draw attention to the way in which the novel as post-modern bildungsroman structures, or even determines, a reader’s engagement with the plot. We become aware of the way in which the “portents of the future” (Raleigh, 1968: 133) inherent in the number 9 seem to be integral to the narrative, only to be surreptitiously relegated to a reader’s sphere of ‘knowledge’ about the outcome of events. In other words, we come to realize that it is not the text that foresees a happy ending to the novel, but a reader, however much she was manoeuvred into adopting this view. The text, with Eiji as its unwitting accomplice, thus seems to predict, not the future outcome of the plot, but how a reader would respond to the surfeit of clues it provides, and deliberately voids this response. In turn, every one of this reader’s cognitive formulations regarding the meaning of the novel are placed into doubt. In this way, and in an ideative about-face, the ‘meaning’ of the empty final chapter is recast when we take into consideration that the number 9, in Japanese culture, is seen to bring bad fortune because of its pronunciation being similar to 85 the kanji for ‘torture’ or ‘agony’. Under these conditions, the constant repetition of the number would have the effect of creating a growing sense of doom, and the disappointing outcome of Eiji’s meeting with his father seems to be preordained by the narrative scheme of the text. Likewise, the earthquake that causes Eiji’s contact with Tokyo, and with Ai, to be severed at the end of the novel appears to have been foreshadowed in every mention of that fateful number. The inconclusive ending of the story, where there is no knowing whether Ai, or Eiji’s other friends living in Tokyo are alive or dead, seems to spell disaster. That is until, in yet another mental shift, the realization dawns that in Japanese culture the number 8 symbolizes good luck, and with the ninth chapter, which would have fulfilled the prophecy of doom, being blank, this leaves the eighth chapter to have the last word (even if not the final say). In this way, tragedy is averted and the final chapter becomes, in a very literal sense, the blank page upon which Eiji, and also a reader, can, as Eiji himself puts it in the third to last sentence of the novel, “imagine a thousand things” (n9d: 418), be they good or bad. The hold of the nine has been broken, as has the authority of cultural practice. This means that premature closure on meaning is evaded, and Eiji is allowed not to choose a final identity, in the same way that a reader does not have to commit to a fixed subject position: Eiji’s subjectivity, along with that of a reader’s, is left open to recurrent interpretation. Such open-endedness is also evident when John Lennon explains to Eiji, in one of the latter’s waking dreams, the meaning of the title to his song: “’The ninth dream begins after every ending’” (398). Here the text seems to be inviting a reader, after having finished the novel, to return to it at will, as either naive newcomer or informed return visitor, or even both at once. Importantly, this return is not necessarily a verbatim re-reading of the text, but more often a ‘dream’, a persistent remembering of the novel’s effects in a montage of meaning, a continual textual resurrection that haunts all other readings. Such a pattern of recurrence bears a powerful resemblance to a second, also predominantly poststructuralist aspect of intertextuality: the metaphor of the palimpsest48. In her comprehensive delineation of the genealogy of this metaphor, Sarah Dillon (2007) traces the way in which the palimpsest, from its inauguration

48 As discussed in the introductory chapter, the intertextual characteristics of the palimpsest are highlighted by Gérard Genette in his 1982 study. Importantly, the palimpsest can be seen to be akin to pastiche, where in pastiche the ‘natural’ link between the copy text and its source is irrelevant, in the same way that there is no link between the superimposed text and its underlay in the palimpsest. 86 as a literary trope by Thomas De Quincey in 1845, comes to present “a simultaneous relation of intimacy and separation” in the way in which the effaced past re-emerges at counter angles to the never-wholly-present present (3). In a meticulous analysis of De Quincey’s palimpsestic writings, and with recourse to Jacques Derrida’s discussions on spectrality, Dillon refers to the “palimpsest of the mind” in which the myth of “a Romantic unity of mind” makes way for the “distinctly post-Romantic spectralization of the self, and of temporality” (33-4). As such, the subject’s conceptualization of a unified self is shown to be a fantasy created in reference to its partial recollections of its own past, in which apparently meaningful bonds are forged in order to maintain the inviolability of this past; in an increasingly post-modern world, this fantasy is gradually contaminated, even despoiled, by “encrypted49 traces” (37) of this very past. Such processes suggest a kind of mental haunting, positing a “spectral structure of the self” (ibid.) that is radically at odds with pre-set, undifferentiated notions of the subject’s identity. Dillon uses as an example of this spectralization the way in which the narratorial subject of the conventional autobiography displays “the interpretative powers of the [ostensibly] inviolable ‘I’” (34). As such, the immature self is distinct from the adult personality, a different entity entirely in time as well as in space, turning it into an object that can be reified and interpreted. In this, the autobiography can be said to be very much like the traditional bildungsroman, where the experiencing self and the narrating one seem to be two discrete characters, however much they may have in common. But, as in autobiography, the whole ‘truth’ of the mature subject’s identity lies buried in the feelings and experiences of the child, which are integrated in the adult but presently accessible only as a memory, a displaced experience that will eventually require interpretation, crucially always unfinished, so as to enable present, as well as future, iterations of the self. So we are proffered “a doubled ‘I’ that incorporates both the child and the adult self” (35). Importantly, and in accordance with Derrida’s idea of iterability (1992: 63), this doubling suggests a sameness that is nonetheless not identical – the temporal distance between experiencing and narrating subject, or immature and adult self, is therefore never wholly bridged,

49 Dillon uses the term here in accordance with Derrida’s view of the concept, in its dual meaning of interment and encodement. 87 implying that the subject’s identity is perpetually under construction, always developing against the indistinct backdrop of visitations from the past. Dillon argues that such a “spectral structure of the self” (37) presents a mental configuration in which iterations from the past, the present, and likely also the future50 are present in the mind. Such a formation “does not elide temporality but evidences the spectrality of any ‘present’ moment which always already contains within it ‘past’, ‘present’, and ‘future’ moments” (ibid). In this regard Josephine McDonagh, in her analysis of the impact of the palimpsest on nineteenth-century thought, notes that this trope is "[b]uilt on a contradiction, a mode that both erases and retains the past, [thus] disrupt[ing] a sense of temporality; and the kind of history facilitated by its retentive function is at once restorative and violating" (214). Such a proximation of two utterly contrasting historiological functions – restoration and violation – illustrates the way in which the palimpsestic text rehearses the highly complicated play of intertextuality in both writing and reading. As a writing tool the palimpsest allows for the past (or preceding texts, and/or their readings) gradually to come into view, however faint, so as to draw attention to the act of re-writing, or over-writing, but without attempting to (artificially) link the surface text and its disparate, previously intact underlay. The palimpsest as a reading practice, on the other hand, while likewise configuring a return of the past that predictably disrupts the present, surprisingly also despoils the supposedly pristine past because of what Dillon sees as a reader’s urge to “[create] relations where there may, or should, be none” (2007: 83). Dillon, drawing on Barthes’s conceptualization of the text as “a polysemic space”, speaks here of “apocalyptic palimpsesting” (84). As such, our reading takes on what Derrida describes as a violence that matches [the text] in its intensity, a violence different in intention, perhaps, but one that exerts itself against the first law [of ‘truth’] in order to attempt a commitment, an involvement, with that law. To move, yieldingly, towards it, to draw close to it fictively [in our imagination, in other words]. The violent truth of ‘reading’ (1992: 152).

Hence, what we see at work in the palimpsest is a kind of intense textual entanglement, described by Dillon as “‘[p]alimpsestuousness’51 – a simultaneous

50 This in as much as the future is habitually, though often mistakenly projected as an ineluctable outcome of past and present experiences. 51 Dillon points out that the unusual use of this term deliberately suggests a form of incestuousness. 88 relation of intimacy and separation” (2007: 3). While not synonymous with intertextuality as first conceived of by Kristeva, and in some ways more complex than the palimpsest envisioned by Genette, this is an intertextual process that graphically (as it were) illustrates a reader’s constitutional tendency to (forcibly) find meaningful links when interpreting a text, even if these links are arbitrary and only superficially borne out. Therefore, in addition to reading being what critics such as Roland Barthes (1971) and Harold Bloom (1973) view, each in their own way,52 as a largely unconscious interweaving (in a reader) of “citations, references, echoes, cultural languages” (Barthes in Leitch, 1971: 1329), it also involves a reader consciously yielding to a specific interpretation of the story even if it is only for that moment, and, as Derrida says, “different in intention” (1992: 152). One could therefore argue that interpretation occurs only because a reader’s engagement with a text is constantly subject to change, and has a different purpose to not only the writer’s, but also to that of previous reading/s (be these her own, or those of other readers). This kind of palimpsestuous reading is arguably evident in Mitchell’s novel. The text cunningly solicits a reader’s collusion by pretending that Eiji’s identity can be explained by means of various intertextual operations; what is more, it does so by feigning innocence, denying knowledge of its hidden agenda (or effaced underlay) by apparently putting all of its cards on the table. After all, the clues to Eiji’s character are there for all to see: he is the boy who enters into a Faustian compact with the thunder god in order to spare himself utter humiliation on the soccer field, only to find that the price of this bargain is the life of his twin sister Anju (who emerges as the architect of Eiji’s quest and his strongest link to the past, so to ‘embody’ most palpably the idea of intertextuality in Eiji’s life). In reiterating the universal motifs of blind desire and dreadful loss, this kind of mythopoeic design exemplifies the archetypal function of the intertextual, which seems, yet again, to guarantee a foreseeable ending to the story. Eiji, we suppose, is made incomplete, unwhole through the loss of Anju and unwholesome by dint of his supposed culpability – in a palimpsestic set-up, the wholeness apparently provided by his biological connection with Anju is therefore effaced. This deficient configuration demands that he grows into a mature identity that would make him

52 Bloom from a psychological perspective, and Barthes from a discursive one. 89 whole again in the end – that is to say, the imperfections of the past are to be overwritten by a reconstituted sense of identity. However, the very same device that apparently guarantees this outcome – the mystical and portentous repetition of the nine – is, as demonstrated earlier, also the one that thwarts its realization. To some extent, then, Eiji’s mental and emotional make-up remains incomplete: the novel ends with Eiji’s, as well as a reader’s, identity always still in the process of becoming. Perhaps what Eiji suffers from, what keeps him from gaining the self- knowledge that leads to the realization of a mature identity, is what Jean Baudrillard (1996), in his discussion on the annihilation of the ‘other’, would describe as a disorder caused by “the definitive loss of the other, [...] the expropriation of the other by the same” (112). Evidence of this is found in Eiji’s recollection in the latter half of the novel that, a few days after Anju’s death, he had [run] away into the interior [of Yakushima island] to understand why Anju had grown with [him], cell by cell, day by day, if she was going to die before her twelfth birthday. [He] never did discover the answer. [...] Is what Eiji Miyake means still rooted on Yakushima, magicked into a cedar on a mist-forgotten mountain flank, and [his] search for [his] father just a vague...passing...nothing? (n9d: 291).

We see Eiji being left fugitive after Anju’s death, alienated from himself by the loss of his intimately fostered ‘other’. His attempt to expropriate her being – to “understand” their “cell-by-cell” entwinement – paradoxically threatens his own sense of otherness, and therefore of identity; so his flight to “the interior” amounts to a psychological journey53 to make sense of this loss, something he was unable to do at the age of eleven, and is years later still at a loss to understand. The period between Anju’s tragic death and Eiji’s “coming-of-age” (101) at twenty is not accounted for in the narrative, leaving him in a kind of limbo for nine (that ever- present number again) years. It is Eiji’s imminent adulthood that compels him to leave home in order to find “what Eiji Miyake means”; this would involve coming to terms with Anju’s death, restoring her otherness through an annulment of his expropriation of her life and death – in other words, through reconstituting her life by finally allowing her to die. This is why, when he returns to Yakushima after

53A detailed analysis of the psychoanalytic significance of the metaphor of “the interior”, and of other signs pertaining to Eiji’s psychological development, falls outside the scope of the present study. 90 finding (yet not acknowledging) their father, Eiji declares that “the point of this journey is to pay [his] respects to Anju” (413). In order to achieve this restitution, however, Eiji must confront otherness: he must go to Tokyo, the complete antithesis of Yakushima, a teeming metropolis composed of “[r]ivers, snowstorms, traffic, bytes, generations, a thousand faces per minute [where not] a single person is standing still” (3). This Tokyo is the epitome of the postmodern city, populated by “drones bark[ing] into mobile phones” (ibid), presenting what Jean Baudrillard would describe as “a world given over entirely to the selfsame (le Même54)” (1996: 112). In this place of constant movement (which, ironically, brings about no measurable change) Eiji must learn how he is ‘other’ from its drone-like denizens, despite the danger of his becoming ‘the selfsame’, as seen when he looks in his “toilet cube mirror [and] a drone looks back at [him] in mild surprise” (n9d: 90). For the same reason, he will have to go back again to Yakushima to confront the significance of what he has learnt, to find out whether his identity is “still rooted” (413) there. Yet, at the end of the novel, his findings remain ambiguous: he is left with the uneasy feeling that “[l]eaving a place is weird, but returning is always weirder. In eight weeks nothing has changed but nothing is the same” (ibid.). In fact, to his mind, his return resembles a resurrection, the resurgence of “[a] soul returning to a body it gave up for dead, amazed to find that everything still works” (392), a “spectralization of the self” (cf. Dillon, 2007: 34), in fact. Here the parallel between Eiji’s quest for identity and a reader’s quest for meaning is openly displayed: one may even take Eiji’s words to mean that an intertextual reader’s return to a text leaves her feeling that “nothing has changed” though “nothing is the same”. Like Eiji’s wraithlike homecoming, a reader’s return to the text amounts to the resurrection of a reading that she had “[given] up for dead”. This sense of revivified and revivifying reading is confirmed when Eiji – with unaccustomed conviction and in a voice that resounds with the authority of the omniscient third-person narrator (or even writer) – declares: “A book you read is not the same book it was before you read it” (n9d: 392).

54 As pointed out in the introduction, the idea of le Même relates to Baudrillard’s conceptualization of the postmodern simulacra, where the ‘original’ can no longer be distinguished from its flawlessly reproduced, yet empty, copy. 91

Eiji’s assertion about reading not only refers to the now familiar idea of the ways in which reading and interpretation may change the text qua text, but also points to the fact that novels, to some degree or another, do not meet the expectations we have when we first open the book. Thus, however confident a reader of the text is, in (re)turning to the first page of the novel, of her ability to interpret it, she (as veteran, or newcomer, or both) is wholly unprepared for the actuality of the reading. Such a state of unreadiness does indeed seem to be the case upon our opening the covers of number9dream. To add to the intertextual significance of the title, and the references to dreams and reality in the lyrics of the song upon which it is based, we are presented with an epigraph taken from Don DeLillo’s debut novel, Americana (1971)55: “It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams”. Upon investigation, a reader discovers (or is reminded) that DeLillo’s text concerns the power of film to misrepresent reality; as such, the epigraph anticipates the ways in which Mitchell’s novel interrogates the viability of distinguishing between what is real and what is not. This connection between these two texts is, of course, not immediately evident (perhaps, in the manner of the palimpsest, never even given), and only emerges as the reading of the novel progresses. Importantly, the fact that the significance of the epigraph only ever becomes available in retrospect obliges a reader consciously to reconsider the outcome of her reading(s), repeatedly and recurrently. In fact, the text makes such a procedure inescapable by frequently referring to the dream-like qualities of Eiji’s experiences, especially in the eighth chapter (n9d: 382, 384, 385, 387, 388, 389, and so forth); these reiterations culminate in Eiji eventually confessing that post-Anju, [he] imagined there lived somewhere, in an advertland house and family, the Real Eiji Miyake. He dreamed of me every night. And that was who [he] really was – a dream of the Real Eiji Miyake (407).

The “Real Eiji Miyake” is, in Eiji’s imagination, a creation of some advertising agency’s campaign for good living; the current Eiji is but a fanciful projection of this unreal figure’s slumbers. As such, ‘reality’ is continually deferred, as is Eiji’s identity, and he has to find recourse in dreams. These dreams become increasingly so surreal as to be almost unintelligible – Eiji speaks here of a “lunatic roaring choir” (406). But, in the end, they are the only tools available to Eiji, and to

55 Of note here is that DeLillo revised the 1971 text in 1989, expunging (or effacing) several pages. 92 a reader, with which to interpret his subjectivity, his attachment to his own identity through self-knowledge. So, towards the end of the novel Eiji’s return to his grandmother’s house, to his beginnings, leads him to profess: I dream all dreamers, all of you. I dream the frost patterns on the temple bell. I dream the bright water dripping from the spear of Izanagi.56 I dream the drips solidifying into these islands we call Japan. I dream the flying fish and the Pleiades. I dream the skin flakes in the keyboard gullies. I dream the cities and the ovaries. I dream a mind in eight parts. I dream a girl, drowning, alone without a word of complaint. I dream her young body, passed between waves and currents, until it dissolves into blue and nothing remains. I dream the stone whale, wrapped in seaweed and barnacles, watching. I dream the message bubbling from its blow-hole. ‘We interrupt this programme to bring an emergency bulletin....’ [...] I would give anything to be dreaming right now (417-8).

In these words – whose poetic arrangement stands in stark contrast to the rest of the narrative – Eiji seems to be taking on the identity of a writer: all of us, all readers, are given shape in his dreams, his ‘writings’, while at the same time we ourselves are dreamers who invent our own worlds. This kind of text, one that gives opportunity to a reader to enter into the act of creation, is what Roland Barthes describes as a “writerly” text (1990), where readers are allowed to break out of their subject position as passive recipients, in the same way that Eiji the creator escapes from his subject position as puppet-like character. Hence his dreams are like the plaintive music of the shakuhachi57 bringing forth the tune of “Frost on the Temple Bell”; they bring into being a universe, as the drops from Izanagi’s spear created the islands of Japan; they grow to span the vast constellations, yet contract to take in the minute particles of skin in the spaces between the keys on a writer’s laptop. He dreams up cities that have the capacity to procreate; in these dreams, the horror of Anju’s death (along with his feelings of guilt) can melt away “into the blue”; here the “stone whale” – which Eiji had once promised Anju would magically transport them to where their parents are (52), and which was instrumental in Anju’s death in that she was trying to reach it when she

56 In Japanese Shinto-mythology, Izanagi and his wife and sister Izanami were given the task of creating the world. They plunged a spear into the ocean and, when they pulled it free, the water that dripped from the spear coagulated and formed the first island of the Japanese archipelago. Here the first gods and humans were born. (http://www.pantheon.org/articles/i/izanagi.html) 57 A Japanese end-flute. 93 drowned – finally speaks its “message” (though unintelligible). All of these imaginings are housed in “a mind in eight parts”, just as the story of Eiji’s coming- of-age is contained in the eight parts of this novel. For a moment the text hesitates between writer and protagonist, wavering between declaring this dream to be ‘true’, and dismissing it as fantasy – then the outside world intrudes and forces Eiji finally to choose between his dreams and reality. He chooses reality, and his beloved Ai, and in that moment attains the self-identity that he had set out to find, even if it turns out to be undetermined – in effect, he is now the author of his own story, and there are “a thousand” (418) options of subjectivity available to him. It is also in this moment of hesitation that the figure of ‘the’ reader comes briefly into focus, when Eiji’s dream takes on a universal definition for the act of creation in both (as Barthes demonstrates) writing and reading. So, in this uncanny space where identity is temporarily suspended, the writer/protagonist briefly makes way for a reader/protagonist, who has in any case always also been the “dreamer”, the one, in Derrida’s words, drawing ever “closer to [the truth] fictively” (1992: 152), even if never attaining it. In the palimpsestuous scheme initiated by the epigraph, these two composite figures become momentarily intertwined in an act of creation that brings forth untold (in the sense of both ‘innumerable’ and ‘not-yet-told’) tales. A reader is allowed, for the moment, to appropriate Eiji the creator’s vision in order to go back to the beginning and ask what this dream, as well as all of the other related images in Mitchell’s novel, means in light of the fragment from DeLillo’s text. Does Mitchell mean to say that Eiji ended up “disposing of dreams” to the detriment of his moral and psychological development? or does the palimpsestic connection, forged by a reader, suggest that Eiji’s dreams will in the end win out against an unpalatable reality? or do we take it that the “reality” of Eiji’s identity is forever “bur[ied]” under the rubble of the earthquake that devastated Tokyo? Inevitably, the answers to such questions are myriad, and ultimately only tentative: in typical poststructuralist fashion, the response is always both ‘yes’ and ‘no’: ‘yes’ this is so, but ‘no’, this is not all. Like Eiji, then, a reader is offered “a thousand” possibilities of meaning, all of them prompting, as well as prompted by, a continual return to the text. The uncertain way in which the novel ends inevitably encourages a reconsideration of the epigraph. Moreover, it also compels us to reassess all of the text’s devices, insofar as they overlay, not only DeLillo’s novel (of which we can 94 discern mere impressions, the whole of it being cloaked here by the numerous overwritings of Mitchell’s novel), but any number of other, similarly fragmented texts. In the process, the palimpsestuous operations of the novel continue to emerge, at one point strongly articulated in Eiji’s description of subway trains as “submarines [that] pass by at different speeds so you can fool yourself you are going backwards [...] glimpses of commuters in parallel windows – two stories being remembered at the same time” (n9d: 56). This image powerfully conveys a reader’s encounter with the novel. The opening lines of the text create the impression that it is ‘the’ reader being directly addressed: “’I know your name, and you knew mine, once upon a time: Eiji Miyake’” (3). However, a few pages into our reading we get that sense of “going backwards” when we realize that the lines we had read was Eiji rehearsing what he will say to his father once they meet. Yet the feeling that these words were also intended for ‘the’ reader of the story, the sense of “two stories being remembered at the same time”, persists. As a first step, the text invites readers in with the phrase “once upon a time”, the age-old overture of the conventional fairy-tale. Subsequently, we are implicated again in the tacit reiteration of Eiji’s claim to know us, in two imaginary meetings: one with his father’s lawyer Akiko Katō (9), the other with his father himself (34). Finally, in the words of the last dream-sequence of the novel, Eiji claims knowledge of “all dreamers, all of [us]” (417). In this penultimate scene of the novel we are reminded once more of that very first address – the one which seems to address ‘the’ reader – and led to consider that perhaps the novel had been about reading (and readers) all along, especially insofar as reading gives licence to the imagination, to dreaming, yet also to a reality in which all meanings are possible. That initial address also inaugurates the main concerns of the bildungsroman – identity and (self)knowledge – but in a way that problematizes these issues. Eiji’s apparently firm claim to his identity is undercut by the fact that, contrary to his assertion, it soon comes to light that he does not know the name of his father, and neither does his imaginary and perennially absent father know his. So, in the end, Eiji’s maturation involves renouncing his father, a move that is crucial in its resemblance to a writer’s Oedipal struggle with her predecessor – as discussed in the introductory chapter – which for Harold Bloom is central to the production and constant reproduction of literary texts. In the process, Eiji also has to abandon his impracticable dreams, returning, in time-honoured bildungsroman 95 fashion, to his beginnings to find a reality in which his subjectivity is, paradoxically, an ever-changing condition (as in a dream). Eiji’s return to Yakushima is parallel to a reader’s recursion to the beginning of the novel, where all potential readings (and readers) are imminent, waiting, in a sense, to be born. Here, there is no easy distinction between reality and dreams – as Eiji muses, early on in the novel: “To people in wombs, what is imagined and what is real must be one and the same” (21). In such a gestational state, then, a reader proceeds to (re)engage with the text.

96

Part 2 Rehearsing the reading of number9dream

I have shown in part one of this chapter how a reader, after completing a (re)reading of number9dream, realizes that she is not yet done making sense of the novel and needs must start anew, with the epigraph. This time, though, and each time in every subsequent (re)reading, she is equipped with some measure of foreknowledge, however incomplete. She now understands that the claim in the epigraph, that “[i]t is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams”, is overwritten by the novel’s sustained bid to discern the reality that has been overwritten by Eiji’s dreams, while at the same time attempting to dispose of his fantasies. In fact, the reader harbours the impression that there is not much to choose between reality and dreams, and that the meaning of this novel lies in some as-yet-undiscovered underlay of events. In what constitutes a rehearsal of the previous (first) reading, as well as a rehearsal for a subsequent one, we therefore attempt to track the endless processes of overwriting throughout this novel, and beyond.

3.2.1. “Panopticon”: overwriting reality A recursion to the start of the novel involves a renewed attention to the palimpsestic workings of the narrative. In so doing, we gradually realize that the first chapter, “Panopticon”, is devoted mostly to articulating the ways in which Eiji daydreams of confronting his father, and that these imaginings overwrite, only to be overwritten by, reality. Such equivocative overwriting is evident in the irony, where Eiji’s fantasies involve high-action sequences with explosions, roll-diving, leap-and-kick movements, uppercuts, and so on (12), while he remains stationary in the Jupiter Café, across from office building occupied by his father’s lawyer Akiko Katō (of the firm Osugi and Bosugi), moving only to go to the bathroom, or to the counter to replenish his store of cigarettes. On the one occasion when he is able to dredge up sufficient courage to actually phone the lawyers’ rooms, his lack of confidence, or conviction, leaves him to “drown” (23), and when he manages to go to the reception desk of the building itself to enquire after Katō, he is peremptorily dismissed (39-40). Eiji’s inertia is an indication of his overarching dilemma: “How do daydreams turn into reality? [...] Not very well, not very often” 97

(4). Consequently, he is unable to give concrete form to his imaginings, instead ineffectually loitering about the café like some ghostly figure, in Akiko’s (imagined) words to Eiji’s (imaginary) Congressman father, “[a]n apparition [that] wants to destroy [his father’s] family first, to punish [him] for what happened to his sister” (30-1). Indeed, one could say that Eiji haunts the halls of fantasy in search of his father, the sponsor of his identity. In one of these visitations, he dreams up a film- noir style movie that features god (the archetypal father) – here named Mr Voorman – as a “straitjacketed” prisoner (35) who claims that he created the universe “[n]ine days ago” (31), and that “everything in this universe is a figment of [his] imagination” (32). This assertion confirms what we already (think we) know, that any act of creation will always involve the imagination; the ‘knowledge’ that we tend to avoid, however, is that the creator could be either “the slave, or the master, of his imagination” (33). The fact that Voorman is imprisoned suggests that he is indeed slave to his creation – an idea supported by the title of the chapter, “Panopticon”,58 which Eiji imagines is also the title of this film – which in turn implies that Eiji has no control over his fantasies. (This impression is confirmed by Eiji’s occasionally wild flights of fancy, as when he imagines all of Tokyo submerged by torrential rain, giving opportunity to a crocodile with the eyes of Akiko Katō to “[cruise] up” and drown him to the strains of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” – “proving that amphibians have a sense of irony” – while “[his] waitress [Ai Imajō]” (18-20) helplessly looks on). However, this allusion to an enslaved god is turned on its head when Voorman manages to break out of prison by switching bodies with his psychiatrist, Dr Polonski – leaving Polonski to “juggle time, gravity, waves, and particles” (36) – leaving us to wonder, again in retrospect (at the end of the novel), what this might indicate regarding Eiji’s subjectivity, particularly in view of the master/slave dialectic evoked in this sketch. The master/slave dialectic was first conceived of by German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (1977);59 of significance here is his argument that engagement with

58 Literally meaning “all-seeing”, this is an allusion to the proposition by Jeremy Bentham (1784-1832), of a model prison where inmates could never know when they were under surveillance, engendering a mental uncertainty that in itself would serve as a crucial instrument of discipline. 59 Hegel’s highly complicated conceptualization of this dialectic, and how it relates to subject-formation, cannot be discussed here. Of interest to my argument is the way in which the difference between these two binaries is eventually effaced by the subject’s self-expression. 98 another consciousness is necessary in order to attain self-consciousness. Simply put, in such an encounter the two consciousnesses – one dominant, one subordinate – vie for supremacy in a life-and-death struggle but, ironically, the moment of the one’s triumph (or mastery) also signals its demise, as it cannot exist without the recognition of its mastery by the other, now deceased. Hence the one’s victory spells annihilation for both. This fear of obliteration, especially on the part of the slave, leads to the relationship between master and slave being held in a state of eternal suspension, where, despite appearances, it is impossible to declare either of them the victor. Ironically, such a stalemate arises from the fact that, through the slave gradually finding self-expression in its identity as slave, working towards mastery of its labour and towards freedom, it grows in self-knowledge to become master of its fate (so to speak). In this way the master (or its conceptualization) is eventually assimilated into the position of slave, though without the slave taking over as master. Thus, while on the surface the subject position of each is apparently maintained, there is ultimately nothing to choose between the two concepts. The scene with Mr Voorman, then, proposes a dream/reality dialectic that overwrites the master/slave rationale, presenting a scheme where self-identity has already been attained in that the creator/master is already also the prisoner/slave. In other words, in the end, when we look back to this scene after reading Eiji’s creation-dream, it becomes clear that the difference between dream and reality has always already been effaced in the same way that, in the palimpsest, the first text is scored through and overwritten by the next.

3.2.2. “Lost Property”: reality-in-becoming Such palimpsestuous operations persist in the second chapter (as it does throughout the novel). In this chapter, entitled “Lost Property”, the most prominent image is that of “two Fujifilm clocks – the left clock shows the actual time, the right shows when the photos will be ready, forty-five minutes into the future” (43-4), those forty-five minutes representing a hiatus where the past, the present, and the future are all at hand. In this interstice, the present is always already consigned to the past: “[a]ccording to Fujifilm, four o’clock slipped by fifteen minutes ago” (80). In this way, the image of the photograph – the quintessential representation of development, of subject-in-becoming – calls forth the spectrality of the present moment, also insofar as it captures what Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida, 99 describes as “the defeat of Time”, a temporal abeyance in which we can “read at the same time: this will be and this has been” (1980: 5-7). Such a view of time is illustrated in this chapter when a homeless woman comes to the lost property office where Eiji now works, looking for her missing “pictures” which she must have “to cover up the clocks” (Mitchell, 2001: 62). These photographs do not actually exist, however; they are, as Mrs Sasaki observes to Eiji, the dispossessed woman’s “memories [...]. All we are is our memories” (ibid). This idea, that memories are like photographs, is borne out in the interleaving of Eiji’s memories of Anju and his childhood with his present-day experiences: he recalls Anju’s fear of forgetting the face of their mother, and his less than reassuring response to her, that their mother “looks like how she looks in the photographs” (58). In effect, he seems, literally, to be haunted by his recollections – at one point he reacts to the intrusion into his “dreams” of the “pattering sound” made by a stray cat (which had come to embody, for Eiji, his sister) by remarking: “I thought you were supposed to be dead” (92). So, as Brian Dillon observes in his review of Barthes’s text, “every photograph is [...] a memorial; the very essence of the medium [as well as, one would suppose, the memory] is its spectral conjuring of death-in-life” (2011: np). One could argue that this spectrality is inherent in living itself, a characteristic of subjectivity unwittingly recognized by Eiji when he witnesses his first boss Mr Aoyama’s suicidal plunge: “Aoyama is no longer alive but not yet dead. His body cartwheels, and falls for a long, long time” (89). Here we find another suggestion of time suspended, of past and present intermingling and projecting into the future. This feature of time also reflects on the workings of memory. For example, as the present-day Eiji remembers his eleven-year old self walking up “the steps to the thunder god shrine [trying] to forget the ghost stories [he’d] heard about how dead children live on these steps”, he realizes (in retrospect, ironically enough) that “once you try to forget something you already remember it” (69). Thus, when Eiji remembers Anju telling him that she “told the ghosts [she] was one of them and they believed [her]” (58) he, in the words of Barthes, “observe[s] with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake” (1980: 7). All of these images depict a palimpsestic configuration in which death has been overwritten by life, but where it nevertheless re-appears in the shadowy corners of the memory. Here the subject-in-becoming is yet indistinct, a virtual figure still caught in the indeterminate space between reality and fantasy. 100

3.2.3. “Video Games”: virtual reality This uncertain space between reality and fantasy, which echoes the interim between writing and reading, is also the one occupied by Eiji when, in the next chapter entitled “Video Games”, he sees himself as one of those “people [...] playing Sony and Sega to reattach [themselves] to unreality” (102). The chapter opens with Eiji involved in a game where he has to rescue a virtual father from a kidnapping; ironically, Eiji asserts that he “would recognize him anywhere” (97), emphasizing the fact that he is able to assign to his father only a cyber identity. Indeed, Eiji himself becomes a virtual figure: “I wander past an electronics shop, and on TV see someone familiar walking past an electronics shop. He stops, examines the TV, amazed and semi-appalled at how he must appear to other people” (100).60 This kind of duality is confirmed in the seventh chapter when Eiji, while playing a life-and-death card game, pronounces: “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” (359). In this Eiji seems to exemplify the post- modern “divided subject”, leaving him to declare: “[s]ometimes I am me, sometimes I am not quite” (117); he therefore experiences himself as wholly other, a vaguely outrageous iteration that continually falters on the edge of being. This is in sharp contrast to the game-player’s usual view, described by Janet Murray in her cultural theory of gaming, of “the self both as an agent and an object within a community of other intentional agent–objects” (2006: 190 – my emphasis). Instead, the text draws attention to Eiji’s position as solitary outsider, depicting him engaging with a game program called Virtua Sapiens where he is offered the opportunity to “select a relationship category” so that he “will never be lonely again” (Mitchell, 2001: 126). The virtual parents devised by this program are less than satisfactory to Eiji; ironically, they are as disappointed by the “virtual son reality generated for [them]” (129). Yet through all this he keeps getting tantalizing glimpses of his supposed father, as when Miriam, the jilted girlfriend of Eiji’s new-found friend Yuzu Daimon, claims to know his father, only for him to find that she had assumed Eiji to be Daimon’s brother, and Daimon’s father to be Eiji’s. The chapter ends with Eiji

60 This description recalls the seventh episode of ghostwritten, where memoirist Alfred talks of seeing himself “[p]elting past the window” (g: 285). 101 playing at another attempt to rescue his “father”, Ned Ludd61, so as to precipitate the “revolution to reverse reality” (149). This father turns out to be a trap set by the game masters, OuterNet, to “detect antiGame tendencies among players” (149). Ultimately, OuterNet (which perhaps refers to some aspect of reality, some imperative outside of the virtual network) rules that “[t]he very idea that ideology can ever defeat the image is itself insanity […] Game over” (ibid). Thus Eiji is ousted from the game, from his fantasies, while yet remaining entrapped by his quest to find his father.

3.2.4. “Reclaimed Land”: unimaginable reality The feeling of his being trapped intensifies when, in the next chapter, Eiji’s quest turns decidedly nightmarish. Continuing to be led by virtual clues and promises of a forthcoming meeting with his “father”, Eiji is kidnapped, and becomes embroiled in a Yakuza gang war. This comes about when he is told by “the virtual bank teller” at an automated teller machine: “’Father will see you now, Eiji Miyake’” (154). After several similar electronic messages Eiji grows increasingly more paranoid, a feeling echoed in his mentioning “a horror movie [where] a psychic killer who discovers his victims’ darkest fear […] murders by trapping them in appropriate nightmares” (156). Eiji’s “appropriate” nightmare involves, on one level, the realization that this “father” is yet another fake, is actually the Yakuza faction boss, Morino, who wishes to punish Eiji for being disrespectful to Miriam (on whom Morino has amorous designs). On another, more tangible level, it entails Eiji – compelled by Morino’s promise that he will reveal the identity of Eiji’s father after midnight (197) – having to witness, during his detainment, scenes of dreadful brutality and murder. At one point, for example, he is forced to look on as Morino and his gang decapitate the agents of their enemy Tsuru, and play ten-pin bowling with their severed heads; the horrified Eiji realizes that he “never learned the vocabulary [he needs] to take this in. Only in war movies, horror movies: nightmares” (200). In effect, the daydreams and fantasies described in the preceding chapters now turn into grotesque reality – where previously reality had been overwritten by Eiji’s imagination, now it resurfaces in monstrous and fearsome ways to overwhelm his naïve imaginings.

61 Supposedly, the person from whom the Luddites – that is, people opposed to automation, computerization or new technologies in general – took their name. 102

Such a distorted re-emergence, what I would call a palimpsestic perversion, is also evident in the enactment of this chapter’s title: “Reclaimed Land”. After his abduction, Eiji is taken to an area of reclaimed land on the outskirts of Tokyo, there to be brought before Morino. In a poignantly palimpsestic gesture, this (artificial) reclaimed land overlies a dredged (natural) inland sea – a despoilment bemoaned by Eiji towards the end of the novel when he cynically remarks that “[a]ll 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” (410) – and is the site where three grotesquely extravagant new gambling and entertainment emporia are being constructed. These developments are, in an instance of dreadful irony, named Xanadu (the mythical city built by Kublai Khan), Valhalla (the hall of slain heroes in Norse mythology), and Nirvana (the Hindu conceptualization of a spiritual state free from suffering). What is actually being reclaimed here is the idyllic legends of the past, but in a context empty of original meaning, a mere venal reiteration of the dream of perfect bliss. By implication, Eiji’s idealistic dreams of the perfect father (and a complete identity) also become a perversion; as Leatherjacket, one of Father’s henchmen, sagely intones: “’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”’” (190). Here the palimpsestic structure of Eiji’s search for identity is clearly articulated – his fantasies overwrite the reality of his “true self”; paradoxically, however, this reality is itself like a fantastical bad dream, a “nightmare stopping [him] waking” (167). Once again the difference between (bad) dream and reality is effaced; once again, Eiji’s identity is left open to interpretation. Eventually, through the intervention of Leatherjacket – whose real name is Suhbataar62 – Eiji is released, with Suhbataar’s (ironic)63 words ringing in his ears: “To survive, you must persuade yourself that tonight was another man’s nightmare into which you accidentally strayed” (202). This observation might also pertain to a reader, who is always straying, not only into some writer’s dreams (or nightmares), but also into the imaginings of some (other) reader (even if that reader is this reader herself): to endure, such a reader must abjure reality, to literally succumb to a suspension of disbelief.

62 This character first appeared in Mitchell’s debut novel, ghostwritten. The fact that he resurfaces here lends a completely new dimension to the idea of intertextuality, which is referred to in the preceding chapter, and which will be addressed again in some of the chapters to follow. 63 In the sense that Suhbataar himself seems to have “accidentally strayed” into “another man’s nightmare”. 103

3.2.5. “Study of Tales”: fabulous reality This kind of suspension seems exactly to be the case in the following chapter, entitled “Study of Tales”. After being released, Eiji is by chance picked up by his landlord Buntaro (who, in another of many bizarre coincidences64, is revealed to be the son of Mrs. Sasaki, Eiji’s new boss at the lost property office) and taken to the house of Mrs. Sasaki’s sister. Intriguingly, the sister – who is away at this time – is a deaf woman, and, perhaps in an actualization of the figure of the writer, the author of fantastical tales and Aesopian-type fables. The house itself is hidden “from the outside world” by a “high privet hedge”, its “back garden […] somebody’s pride and joy [with a pond where] dragonflies skim over the duckweed” (209). It offers a tranquil niche that is somehow exempt from the demands of time and history: “[n]owhere in the house is a single clock, or even a calendar” (213). Here Eiji may renounce reality for a while, and recuperate from the terrors he had experienced (though reality, and the anxiety about his burgeoning selfhood, can be seen to lurk in the background when Eiji compares his stay at the house to “waiting for an earthquake” (208), an ironic foreshadowing of the earthquake at the end of the novel that heralds his maturation). In a certain sense, this chapter becomes a metaphor for the escapist function of fiction, in both its writing and reading. It seems literally to offer a respite in the very midst (the chapter falls in the middle of the novel’s nine sections) of the narrative structure and its development, in the same way that writing perhaps may be seen to provide an escape from the outside world. Moreover, in acknowledgement of both metafiction and meta-reading, it is as if a reader too is afforded a breathing space in which to consider the nature of fiction and her own involvement in it. This much is evident when Eiji, in his explorations of the house, comes across a “study of tales”, an archival site65 that “is sentient with books” (210). Eiji, partly because of boredom, cannot “help [him]self. [He] begin[s] to read” (ibid), that is to “study” these tales. In effect, Eiji is assigned the role of reader whereby he mimics the actions (though not necessarily the responses) of a reading subject – hence a narrative niche is created in which ‘the’ reader of this novel is allowed momentarily to take shape.

64 As mentioned before (chapter 2, part 1, n.2), coincidence is both the cause and the consequence of the uncanny, intertextuality, and singularity. 65 The metaphor of the archive becomes even more palpable in Cloud Atlas, which forms the centre of my discussion in Chapter 4. 104

The brief materialization of a specific reader can be said to come about in the interplay between the two parallel narrative streams of this chapter: one an account of Eiji’s stay at the house, and his activities during this time (including writing and reading), the other the ‘reading’ of a fantastical tale written by the deaf author. This tale is presented as a fable, and is crammed with a surfeit of allusions to language and writing; in this way, it comes to represent a contemplation by its author, and perhaps even by Mitchell (suggested by the fact that the main character of the fable, Goatwriter, has a stammer, like Mitchell himself) of, on the one hand, the mechanics of writing and, on the other, the processes of reading. The fable consists of four parts, entitled “Margins”, “Hungry Town”, “Queen Erichnid’s Web”, and “Study of Tales”, which concern the doings of three anthropomorphic animals. The first is Goatwriter, (whose name may be a slip-of- the-tongue reference to ‘ghostwriter’, someone behind the scenes who writes on behalf of another).66 Goatwriter is a ‘goat’ of letters, who not only collects and writes “fragments of a truly untold tale” (207),67 but is himself an avid reader68 with a propensity, shared with the writer of the fable, for tongue-twisters.69 Hence phrases such as “respectable spectacles” (205), “monocle chronicle”, “well- wallowed hollows” (206), “Snowdonian snowdrop” (207), and so on, throughout the tale, all draw attention to the constructedness of language, as well as its infinite potential for play. The other two characters are Mrs Comb the hen (with play on the idea of the typical ‘mother hen’) who is Goatwriter’s servant and cook, and Pithecanthropus (referring to anthropology’s so-called Java Man), a pre-linguistic upright ape who is Goatwriter’s handyman and bodyguard. These three reside in a “venerable coach” (206) that ceaselessly travels, of its own volition, through a post- apocalyptic wasteland; they find themselves in the “margins” of what Goatwriter describes as an “[i]nky landscape, [with] paperpulp sky” (206). In effect, the three

66 It is almost impossible here not to recollect Mitchell’s first novel, ghostwritten, and all of its concerns regarding storytelling, writing, and reading. 67 We are reminded of the noncorpum’s search, in ghostwritten, for “the first story” (g: 164); we also ‘recall’ the structure of Cloud Atlas, which comprises a collection of “fragments”. 68 On first introduction, he is reading the poetry of Princess Nukada, one of the great Japanese female poets of her time. Thirteen of Nukada’s poems appear in the Man'yōshū, the so-called “Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves”. Interestingly, poem #9 is known as one of the most difficult within the Man'yōshū to interpret. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27y%C5%8Dsh%C5%AB] 69 Once again, It is likely no coincidence that Goatwriter bears such a striking resemblance to Dr Seuss, who famously said, in I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!, that “[t]he more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” 105 companions are caught in a dazzle of infinite mirroring, between the pages of a book written about in another book, read by someone who is being read about. In this kind of extended mise-en-abyme, our attention is once more drawn to the interweaving of reading and writing practices, and the way in which intertextuality – and in particular its palimpsestic devices – structures both of these experiences. On an intertextual level, then, Goatwriter is beset, in a rather parodic fashion, by all the tribulations of the typical writer. He believes (perhaps superstitiously) that his writing stems from the “whisperings” of the fountain pen he uses, the one that had also been used by Lady Shōnagon thirteen thousand years ago to inscribe her “pillow book” (205). When this pen is stolen by what he supposes is a “goatload of connival rivals [who] have the will to kill his quill”, he fears, in a delightfully adroit reference to the semantic jumble that is literary criticism, that the “critics will de-re-un-in(con)struct him” (238). He despairs over the loss, or supposed theft, of “dozens of pages [written] last night” but, in a bizarre twist, it eventually transpires that he was “eating [his] own pages as [he] wrote them”, literally getting the words “stuck in his throat” (216). During their quest to find Goatwriter’s purloined pen, the trio come across a number of outlandish creatures. There is Queen Erechnid, mistress of the “website” and instigator of the theft, who believes that “[t]he paper book is dying”, and whose mission it is to put an end to literature because “[w]riting is not about “fulfilment”! Writing is about adoration! Glamour! Awards!” (246). We also encounter the Queen’s henchman ScatRat, a rodent who uses garish text-speak and desires to “renounce [his] solid state for the virtual [because being] marginalised was boring” (245). Also featuring are “word hounds” that are on the trail of a hapless writer who explains, “sliding a long thorn from his crown”, that the words of a novel he had written “dogged” him despite his hiding “in schools of thought, in mixed metaphors” (262). All of these images illustrate, in strangely surreal terms, a variety of concerns regarding writing: the way in which it is an aspect of the imagination; how it is under siege not only from “two-dimensional” (244) electronic substitutes and pulp-writers who are only in it for the fame, but also from overweening literary practitioners; and how the writer is seen as some messianic figure whose suffering can redeem humankind. Significantly, the redemptive quality of literature implied in this series of images harks back to the scene with Mr Voorman – or god – in chapter one (simultaneously jumping forward to Eiji’s final dream of creation). Indeed, the god- 106 figure is resurrected (so to speak) in two instances in this fable. The first is when Goatwriter and associates first set forth to track down his stolen “pages”, and they happen upon “[a] scarecrow, nailed to a ‘T’” who ends up being viciously “savaged [by] two hellhounds” for promising that “[t]his day...we shall sit with my father in Paradise” and so “giv[ing] away the plot” (211-12). This is followed by Mrs Comb encountering god in the form of a “hippie [with a] psychedelic surfboard”, ginger dreadlocks, wraparound sunglasses and a “wonky” halo, who “graduated [from divinity college] third-class dishonours” so that “nobody even bothers consulting [him]”, and who seems to Mrs Comb quite incapable of responding to “a wing and a prayer” (220-1). Curiously, nonetheless, when her life is threatened by the starving villagers at the marketplace and she cries out, reading from page nine of the “holy book” of stories (collected by Goatwriter), “Father! Father! Why hast thou forsaken me?” (233), he appears and saves her “in the nick of time” (233). These two essential functions of the Christ-figure – suffering and redemption – evoke the romance of the tortured artist, and the concomitant restitutive power of art. However, here the writer is the proverbial “straw man” – a front man for some questionable practice or another, his suffering rendered bathically inauthentic – or a counter-culture dropout whose efforts, however worthy, are themselves relegated to the realms of rhetoric and cliché. The traditional writer and his accoutrements are vanished; as Mrs Comb laments upon Goatwriter’s disappearance: “First his story, then his pen, and now he’s lost himself!” (252). In effect, and in typical poststructuralist spirit, the god-like Author is dethroned, albeit by the same gesture that allows an all-too-human writer to emerge and, indeed, merge with a reader. This much is evident when, at the end of the fable, Goatwriter arrives at a house that “would not have seemed out of place in a sleepy suburb, with its pond of duckweed and dragonflies” (266), the very garden where Eiji, the reader, found refuge from reality (209). In the attic of this house Goatwriter discovers his “writing bureau [and] the pen of Sei Shōnagon” awaiting him – in an action that heralds the rise of the writerly reader, “Goatwriter took out a fresh sheet of paper [...] Reality is the page. Life is the word” (266-7). As much as reality is circumvented by the deaf author’s fantastical tale, ‘real’ life keeps intruding on Eiji’s idyllic sojourn, both in the form of visits from various people, and of two letters he receives ,and the one he himself writes. One of these visitors is Kozue Yamaya, the detective who had investigated his father on behalf 107 of Morino, and to whom Eiji had sent a written request for them to meet so that she could hand over the documentation she had pertaining to his father. Though Yamaya fails to release the documents, their encounter has far-reaching consequences: later, in chapter seven, Eiji receives a letter from her in which she recounts her horrific treatment at the hands of the Yakuza, how her son, also named Eiji, was murdered by the Yakuza and his organs sold on the black market. Included in the letter are discs that contain damning evidence against this organ- harvesting ring, which Eiji eventually disseminates on the Internet with the help of a cyber-virus provided by his computer-hacker friend, Suga, and which serves to rid Eiji of the threat of future persecution. The parallel drawn here between the two Eijis once more highlights the way in which the palimpsestic structure of the text addresses the vexed issue of identity, and the way in which the individual attains a sense of his own subjectivity. Indeed, the current Eiji’s continued existence overwrites that of the murdered one; nevertheless, the deceased Eiji is resurrected by his sharing a name with the living one – paradoxically, however, Eiji Miyake’s death is inherent in that of the other Eiji’s, and vice versa. In effect, what is brought to the surface here is the realization of the outcome of Eiji’s quest for identity, the futility thereof, had his fate been that of the other Eiji’s (as it so very nearly could have been), a sort of “death-in-life” (Dillon, 2011) that forever suspends his identity. Ironically, however, futile is precisely what Eiji’s pursuit turns out to be when he prefers not to reveal his identity to his father when they eventually meet – in a sense, this Eiji Miyake, the one who was desperately searching for his ideal father, does die, must in fact die, so as to facilitate the subject’s initiation into self- knowledge. Hence the subject once again comes into being in “an anterior future of which death is the stake” (Barthes, 1980: 7). In this way, the attainment of self-knowledge could be said to be linked to the act of reading, insofar as Eiji the reader comes to know about his origins through the letters that he receives during his stay at the fantasy-writer’s house, and learns to ‘know’ himself (or revise what he knows about himself) through his own assimilation of this information. The first letter is from his mother, which is actually her second, she having written to him before (as described in the chapter entitled, most ironically, “Lost Property”), to justify her abandoning Eiji and his sister (71-4). In the most recent communication, which seems literally to overwrite the previous one, she reveals her whereabouts, and confesses that she should 108 never have burdened him with her guilt-ridden recollections of the past (249-51). Of course, despite this attempt at effacement, traces of the first letter will constantly re-emerge, continually to be ‘read’ by Eiji in his search for self-knowledge, every new experience in itself an overwriting of the preceding one. In this way, the formation of Eiji’s (present) identity constitutes a palimpsestic, moment-by-moment accretion of previous selves, all simultaneously also projecting (paradoxically, in retrospect) into the future. In similar vein, a reader’s subjectivity changes with every new revelation of the plot, encompassing all earlier reading(s) of the text, all the while “hinting at portents of the future” (Raleigh, 1968: 133).

3.2.6. “Kai Ten”: identity, in reality This accrual of self-knowledge is also evident in the second letter received by Eiji, one from Takara Tsukiyama, who believes he “may be [Eiji’s] paternal grandfather” (258), and who wishes to arrange for them to meet in the Amadeus Tea Room. Therefore, at the start of the next chapter entitled “Kai Ten”, Eiji is once more preparing to meet a father-figure. However, in a displacement that by this time has become customary, the man who arrives is not his grandfather (who is seriously ill) but an old friend, Admiral Raizo. The latter explains that Mr Tsukiyama desired to meet Eiji because “[b]lood-lines are the stuff of life. Of identity! Knowing who you are from is a requisite of self knowledge [sic]” (274). This claim suggests a different kind of accretion in the formation of the subject, that of history and family background – it therefore proposes another avenue of investigation for Eiji to follow in trying to determine his identity. We see this when Mr Tsukiyama wants Eiji to read a journal that his brother Subaru, the pilot of a suicide craft (or kaiten), kept at the end of World War II – as Raizo tells Eiji: “He [your grandfather] wants what you want [...] Meaning” (275). This meaning, however, seems destined to remain suspended: Subaru’s function as suicide bomber reminds us of another suicide, that of Mr Aoyama, thus recalling the death-in-life characteristic of subjectivity – evident in Subaru’s words: “By the time you read these words, Mother will have already received a telegram informing you of my death and posthumous promotion” (275) – that is able to conjure but a spectre of meaning. As Eiji observes in the course of his reading of the journal, “the pages are laminated, but the pencil marks are fading away to ghost lines” (281).

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So, in search of this ghost-like meaning, Eiji’s reading experience in the hopes of gaining self-knowledge continues, this time comprising a first-person narrative that, while actually addressing Takara, seems also to be aimed at Eiji – “These words are for you”, writes Subaru (275) – in the same way that Eiji’s opening address (3) was at first glance meant for the reader. As such, Eiji’s experience of reading serves to remind a reader of her own response to this kind of textual doubling, or iteration of the self, and of the uncertainty of meaning that goes with it. Moreover, Eiji’s reading of the journal is interleaved with his telephone conversations with Ai Imajō about the meaning of life (this in the wake of Eiji questioning Subaru’s initial conviction that his honourable death would give meaning to his life). This scenario reflects on both Eiji the reader’s attempts to understand the meaning of his great-uncle’s suicide, and a reader’s own processes of interpretation so as to determine the significance of this novel. At one point, Ai wonders “if the meaning of life lies in the act of looking for it” (288); not only does this remark refer to a reader’s attempt to discern meaning in the act of reading, but also to Eiji’s “looking for” his father, once again making explicit the link between reading and subject-formation. However, in the end Subaru’s death is made utterly meaningless when, at the crucial moment, his kaiten does not explode but sinks to the bottom of the sea; he has become forever “[d]ead but still alive. Alone in kaiten” (314). So the meaning of his life remains always suspended, leading Eiji to realize: The Japan [Subaru] died for never came into being. It was a possible future, auditioned by the present, but rejected with other dreams. [In Subaru’s Japan] I guess I would not have been ‘I’. I would have been another ‘I’ (310).

Here Eiji must face the fact that the identity he dreams of has been “rejected” by the present, that, like Subaru, the meaning of his life, his subjectivity, is determined from moment to moment by the present reality where “[one self is] dead but [another is] still alive” (314). In effect, this recognition of his is a foreshadowing of the way in which the novel ends, where Eiji must abjure his dreams of identity in favour of the unknown “possible” futures in which his subjectivity is constantly a matter of conciliation between what he wishes for and what is, while at the same time acknowledging that anything can be. When Eiji returns to Amadeus Tea Room for the meeting with his grandfather as arranged with Admiral Raizo, he learns (from his stepmother and -

110 sister) that the man he had met on the previous occasion actually had been his grandfather (who had, in another instance of death-in-life, died the previous evening). Here we find another doubling of the self, which once more focuses our attention on the way in which identity can only be discerned in retrospect, that a present identity is forever a case of “mistaken identity” (308). Similarly, a reader’s subject position is evident only in looking back, in revising previous readings that in that moment of the present was always a misreading.70 Eiji’s hopes of ever meeting his father are dashed when his stepmother convinces him that “[her] husband does not wish to meet [him]” (321); with the promise that he will stop searching for his father, Eiji leaves there to “get taken back to where [he] came from” (322). So a reader is left with the impression that the climax of the plot has been reached, and that Eiji’s “meaning is cancelled” (322); as such, Eiji’s identity, like Subaru’s life, has come to nought.

3.2.7. “Cards”: reality, by chance Despite the anti-climax experienced by Eiji, and what he perceives as the end of his quest, his existence continues, wraithlike. The seventh chapter, “Cards”, presents Eiji now working temporarily as a cook in a pizza kitchen; here he meets the pizza-delivery biker and sometimes illusionist, Doi, who has this wisdom to impart: The human condition is a card game, man. Our hand is dealt in the womb [...] ...cards come, cards go. Some days, you got a strong hand. Other days, your winning streaks end in bad gongs. You bet, call, bluff [...] And how do you win this game? [...] When you win, the rules change, and you find you lost (352).

In other words, living, according to Doi, is a gamble, a game of chance that ultimately cannot be won because the rules keep changing. Interestingly, Doi’s reference to “the womb” serves as a reminder of Eiji’s remark, very early on in the novel, that “[t]o people in wombs, what is imagined and what is real must be one and the same” (21). This intratextual link, in itself a type of overwriting, would suggest that reading is likewise a game of chance, where the outcome is always suspended because the rules are effectively mutable. Despite our impression at the end of the previous chapter that Eiji’s search had come to an end, then, he is

70 As explained in the introductory chapter, this concept of Harold Bloom’s (1975) may be adapted to also account for the cognitive, rather than the merely psychological, aspects of reading. 111 once again inveigled into believing his quest could succeed, based on a message on his answering machine from someone claiming to be his father. Not surprisingly (to a reader, if not to Eiji), this call proves to be a trap set by the Yakuza in order to collect on unpaid debts left by Morino. At this meeting, ‘god’ makes his fourth appearance in the novel when “[a]n intercom clicks on, and the voice of god fills the room” (356); this god demands vengefully, and in a scandalous reversal of his traditional role, that those “gathered here today” must “pay [their] debts to [him]” (ibid), if not in money, then in blood. To this end, Eiji and three other men, the Yakuza’s “most hopeless debtors” (357), are forced to play a deadly game of cards in which the one to draw the Queen of Spades (reminding us, in another recursive move, of the hotel Eiji visited with Yuzu Daimon, which set in motion all of the terrifying events that followed, also bringing Eiji to this place) will be released, while the others will be put to death. It transpires that “god” is in fact Tsuru, Morino’s old (and unexpectedly unvanquished) foe. In yet another fantastical twist of fate, Eiji is set free when Tsuru succumbs to a stroke and is burnt alive when his face is “grilled [...] to the hotplate” (361). Tsuru’s death thus presages the death of god and, as in the deaf writer’s fable, the demise of the Author which, as Barthes has demonstrated, not only releases Eiji the character from the tyranny of the text, but also gives a reader-as-writer the freedom briefly to make her appearance. Eiji’s freedom, and also a reader’s, rests on the realization that he is at last exempt from manipulation, that “since Tsuru died nobody wants to trap [him]” (370). Nevertheless, when he is required by his boss, Sachiko Sera, to deliver a pizza to “Tsukiyama, [at] Osugi & Bosugi, PanOpticon” (369), he fears another ambush: as in the past, all the evidence points to this Tsukiyama being his father and, as in the past, this may be yet one more mystifying ploy to enmesh him in some or other inexplicable plot. However, when he sees the order – the Kamikaze,71 a decidedly unpalatable combination of “Mozzarella crust, banana, quail’s eggs, scallops, treble chilli, octopus ink” (65-6) – Eiji (and with him, a reader) is catapulted back to a then random and wholly disregarded moment, “[w]eeks ago [when] a man misdialled, called [his] capsule thinking [he] was a pizza restaurant, and ordered this same pizza. Only he never misdialled. That man

71 This reference, denoting Japanese suicide attacks during WWII, is an ironic overwriting of chapter 6, “Kai Ten”, which, like so many of the other palimpsestic effects of the text, vulgarizes the significance of those events (something which was perhaps already precipitated by Subaru’s anticlimactic death). 112 was [his] father” (370). In a staggering turn of events, Eiji, and a reader, must process the knowledge that he had unwittingly ‘found’ his father “weeks ago”, while working, ironically enough, at the lost property office, and that his father had, without Eiji realizing it, offered his “sincerest apologies”, confessing: “What I did is inexcusable. Inexcusable” (66). As such, all of the subsequent (past) events have to be reviewed, all of the apparently chance encounters reassessed, not only by a reader, but also by Eiji: [...] My father is not Akiko Katō’s client – he is her colleague. Akiko Katō is why I watched PanOpticon from Jupiter Café. Jupiter Café is why I met Ai Imajō. Ai Imajō is why I met Sachiko Sera. Sachiko Sera is why I am standing in Nero’s, preparing a pizza for my father (370).

Here we see Eiji going back over the plot, tracing the causality of events in the very same way that a reader would in an attempt to construe, with “[n]o more misdirections, jumped conclusions, lies” (ibid), the meaning of these links. In effect, Eiji’s return points to the inaugural moment of his self-knowledge: he realizes that, after all, the way in which events unfolded “is simple” (ibid) – echoing the introductory statement of the text, that now seems like a repetition. So, in an unembellished, if anticlimactic – “no explosives in [the pizza box] now” (371) – overwriting of his daydreams, Eiji finally manages to gain access to Panopticon and his father; however, finding the man to be obnoxious and vulgar, Eiji elects, in another renunciation of his fantasies, not to make himself known after all. Consequently, the very first lines of the novel – “It is a simple matter. I know your name, and you knew mine, once upon a time” (3) – are rescinded; inevitably, the subsequent events are at the same time also, if not revoked, radically recast, giving rise to an overarching palimpsestic gesture that not only overwrites the entire text, but pre-empts the empty pages of the ninth chapter.

3.2.8. “The Language of Mountains is Rain”: reality reversed The penultimate (yet also final) chapter, enigmatically entitled “The Language of Mountains is Rain” describes Eiji’s return to Yakushima to see his mother and “pay [his] respects to Anju” (413). His action also signifies the gradual effacement of this text that results from a reader’s return to the beginning of the story (even if not the start of the text). Eiji’s return, which he sees as “a perfect reversal of the way [he] imagined things” (382), is symbolized in this chapter by a

113 complete and unexpected (in view of his sober realization that his idea of a perfect father was but a fantasy) reversion to his dream-like state at the start of the text. These dreams are disconcertingly surreal, involving “[j]ellyfish [that] fall from the sky and die” (381), “Claude Debussy [bringing] a classified message from [Eiji’s] great-uncle [Subaru]” (ibid), a discussion with Mr Aoyama in which he declares that “[d]eath is not so bad, not when it actually happens” (392), Yoko Ono “dressed like the Queen of Spades” (397), a conversation with John Lennon where he tells Eiji that “’#9dream’ is a descendant of ‘Norwegian Wood’. Both are ghost stories” (398). It is as if all of Eiji’s preceding experiences and conversations have been thrown together in an incoherent symbolic mix which seems to promise a meaning that is always just out of reach. If there is a consistent thread to be found in this bewildering array of signs, it is most likely the various definitions of dreams that Eiji receives from the characters he meets on his return journey. So “Ogre”, the first truck-driver that Eiji travels with, warns: “’Be very careful what you dream,’” (385); “Monkfish”, the second truck-driver to give Eiji a lift, claims that “[n]obody really knows what dreams are” (387), but advises: “’Trust what you dream. Not what you think.’” (389). Then there is “Mrs. Persimmon”, [a] sort of dream interpreter” (401), who has this to say: Dreams are shores where the ocean of spirit meets the land of matter. Beaches where the yet-to-be, the once-were, the will-never-be may walk amid the still-are [...] (394).

Here the text provides the clearest articulation yet of its subject position, along with that of its writer, its narrator, and its reader: dreaming, it is suggested, opens up that uncanny space occupied simultaneously by past, present, and future, containing even the “possible future[s] auditioned by the present, but rejected with other dreams” (310). This is a liminal space where temporal flow is held in abeyance, so that all “dreamers” (417) come in to being, regardless of time and place. Throughout the novel, the various ways in which these “dreamers” become manifest – as writer, protagonist-narrator, reader – all point to the text being the site of hesitation, of the suspension of meaning. In other words, even if Eiji’s dream of creation (417) is interrupted by reality, it is allowed to continue (albeit in the form of the “yet-to-be”) on the empty (effaced) pages of chapter nine; moreover, these blank pages also become the space in which the reader may record the story of her own recurrently emerging subjectivity.

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3.2.9. Conclusion: intertextual reading The upshot of the various devices employed by the text, all of which find purchase in the palimpsestic operations of intertextuality, is therefore related, as I have shown, to the specific structure of number9dream, namely that of the bildungsroman. This mode of writing, perhaps more so than any other, allows for the development of the protagonist-narrator to be articulated in ways that also draw attention to the mechanics of reading, as well as the growth of self-knowledge in a reading subject. In this novel, it gradually comes to light that this growth is a process initiated, as well as continually propagated, by the perceptual uncertainty displayed by the protagonist and narrator of the text, which also shapes a reader’s interpretation of events. Indeed, this uncertainty results in a cognitive ambivalence, where iterations of the self vacillate unceasingly between the traces of past, present, and future texts that are all present in the mind of a reader, but that, paradoxically, can only be accessed in retrospect. So we see the formation of a “spectral structure of the self” (Dillon, 2007: 37) that resembles a palimpsestic design in which vestiges of the “encrypted” (ibid) past resurface to disrupt the present, ironically also despoiling the past; as a result, the present offers “portents” of the future in which this present, having now become the past, is always already marred by the compulsion of a protagonist-narrator, as well as a reader, to “[create] relations where there may, or should, be none” (83). What occurs here, in other words, is a kind of mental haunting that involves various encounters with ‘otherness’, both real and imagined; this sense of the self being other brings about, in the subject (both protagonist-narrator and reader), a perpetual state of unreadiness that, despite the text’s various indications to the contrary, cannot guarantee a predictable outcome to the story. Likewise, the identity of a protagonist-narrator, along with that of a reader, cannot be foreseen, notwithstanding its many aforeseen manifestations. Such indeterminacy serves to confirm that the identity of the subject is always in the process of becoming. The different stages of the subject-in-becoming can be traced, in succession it would appear, throughout the nine chapters of the novel; moreover, this progression would seem to be prefigured by the epigraph: “It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams”. Thus the first chapter depicts Eiji as the naive dreamer who fantasizes about confronting his father, which in effect 115 overwrites ‘reality’ with various fantastical scenarios. The second chapter presents Eiji’s identity as indistinct, still evolving; it “develops” the process of overwriting by using the image of the photograph, a palimpsestic device that illustrates the “death- in-life” (Dillon, 2011) quality of subjectivity to propose that identity is forever deferred. In chapter three, the deferral of subjectivity is demonstrated when Eiji’s identity becomes yet more undefined, when he himself becomes a virtual figure, both subject and object of various computer games in which he attempts to rescue his “father” – these games constantly rehearse Eiji’s failure to fulfill his mission, effectively ousting him from his fantasies of identity, while yet ensnaring him in the quest for self-knowledge. The sense of being entrapped intensifies in the next chapter, which portrays Eiji as the hapless victim of circumstances – his horrendous experiences with the Yakuza imprison him in a reality for which his imaginings could never have prepared him; to endure, Eiji (along with a reader) must literally suspend disbelief. The fifth chapter, which presents Eiji in the guise of reader of an extravagantly surreal fable, illustrates this kind of suspension; it also offers, in the fable’s excessive references to language and writing, a hiatus in which the mechanics of literature, its reading and writing, can be reviewed. In this, a narrative niche is created in which ‘the’ reader of the novel is allowed to momentarily take shape. The identity of Eiji as reader persists when, in chapter six, he is seen to be studying a journal written by his great-uncle Subaru, the pilot of a WWII suicide craft. Eiji, like any reader, tries to assign ‘meaning’ to Subaru’s death, but is thwarted by the fact that Subaru’s kaiten fails to explode at the crucial moment – in other words meaning, and with it identity, is not necessarily the guaranteed result of reading. This kind of ineffectuality of meaning is highlighted in the next chapter, where reading is implicitly compared to living, which is in turn seen as a game of chance that ultimately cannot be won because the rules keep changing. Therefore, when Eiji realizes that he had unwittingly met his father some time ago, he (and a reader) has to return to that moment so as to reassess the causality of the entire plot, a reconsideration that also ambiguously recasts the epigraph. It is a process which configures an overarching palimpsestic gesture that not only overwrites the entire text, but pre-empts the empty pages of the ninth chapter. Eiji’s recursion to his inaugural moment of self-knowledge, shadowed by a reader’s return to the beginning of the story, is enacted in the eighth chapter by the former’s return to 116

Yakushima, effecting the gradual effacement of Eiji, and ‘the’ reader’s, identity. The blank pages of the final chapter thus serve to re-open Eiji’s quest for identity, illustrating indisputably that there can be no foreclosure on identity, that it is always in the process of becoming. This continual, moment-by-moment development of the subject, both protagonist-narrator and reader, brings to the fore another significant aspect of spectrality: the impossibility of conceptually solidifying the past. The next chapter will focus on the way in which Mitchell’s third novel, Cloud Atlas (2004) deals with such temporal concerns, especially insofar as the narrative structure of the text demonstrates how the spacio-temporal context of the spectre – both narrator(s) and reader(s) – is paradoxical. In other words, as also demonstrated in this reading of number9dream, the spectre always appears as a singularity, and each “return” of the subject is simultaneously its apparitional debut. This kind of spectrality is what Jacques Derrida associates with the workings of the archive (1995: 54), an enterprise made explicit in the narrative structure of Cloud Atlas.

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Chapter 4 Cloud Atlas: the future-to-come

The cloud atlas turns its pages over. David Mitchell, number9dream

What we preserve of the books we read […] is in truth no more than a few fragments afloat, like so many islands, on the ocean of oblivion. Pierre Bayard, How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read

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Part 1 Remembering the future

Cloud Atlas, published in 2004, is David Mitchell’s third and arguably best known72 novel, one that has attracted significant critical attention. Some of the most comprehensive and influential of such scholarly pieces are found in David Mitchell: Critical Essays (2011), edited by Sarah Dillon, which features a number of remarkably diverse approaches to the text: not least of these is Dillon’s own reading of the book as an elucidation of “predacity and its associated concerns of colonialism, abusive exploitation, slavery and rampant consumerism” (2011: 10). From a different perspective, Hélène Machinal argues that “the novel is rooted in postmodernity but that it also transcends it by introducing a philosophical dimension [of the posthuman] that goes beyond the individual level to a more collective one” (2011: 127). Caroline Edwards, in turn, focuses on “Mitchell’s optimistic, humanistic aesthetic,” evident in Cloud Atlas when the text moves “beyond the crippling passivity of domestic individualism towards a reformulated vision of community, solidarity and political alternatives” (2011: 179-80). More pertinent to my study, perhaps, is Martin Paul Eve’s comments on narrative structure, where “the reader will find no representation of a ‘real’ world in this novel, only stories representing stories representing stories; an Arabian Nights73 or a Manuscript Found in Saragossa” (2015: np). Also of relevance to my thesis is Courtney Hopf’s description of the metafictional aspects of this book, where she speaks of “the metaphor of storytelling” (2011: 108) that challenges “our ideas about how readers can interact with a text” from a subjective perspective, while simultaneously encouraging “the reader to experience these slippery conceptions of narrative, identity, and subjectivity” (112). Patrick O’Donnell is equally interested in the question of identity in the text, linking it to the ways in which the “genre and structure of the story and the skein of relations between stories inform the novel’s thematics; the mode of narrative transmission is a primary aspect of narrative meaning” (2015: 74).

72 Its popularity was likely enhanced when in 2012 the novel was made into a film of the same name, directed by Lana and Lilly Wachowski, with the screenplay written by Tom Tykwer, and featuring Hollywood notables such as Tom Hanks and Halle Berry. 73 This could also be said of ghostwritten, as I indicate in Chapter 1. 119

In this chapter, I likewise focus on the novel’s different modes of “narrative transmission”, or generic styles, to demonstrate that while each story posits a different kind of reader, these stories also combine in ways that simulate a single reader’s fitful engagement with a text. In other words, each of the novel’s six stories is rendered in a different genre at the same time that the narrative poses as a thematic unit; this ploy highlights the fact that, while the narrative devices of a text rely on certain common effects, each reader’s response (and each response from a single reader) to a text is, or will be, idiosyncratic and unexpected in ways that will continue to elude a definitive description. We see such quirkiness when the style of the narrative presented in one fragment of the novel cannot, or will not, predict that of the next; nor is its mode of transmission rationalized by its successor, or vice versa. By the same token, a reader’s experience of one piece cannot prepare her for the next one. At best, it is only the ‘reading’ of a piece by the protagonist of the next one – what Courtney Hopf refers to as a process of “remediation: (in Dillon 2011: 119) – that can hint at one of the ways in which it could have, or should have been read; confusingly, such a gesture is only possible when we find out, later, how it will eventually be read. In a sense, then, any particular reading is always already a memory, more so when we consider that the reading of any one fragment will never coincide with the events that it describes. This suggests that a particular account may stir a recipient’s memories of events in ways that seem so similar as to be almost personal. For example, Luisa Rey’s reading of her predecessor’s letters “disturb her deeply [with] images so vivid she can only call them memories” (CA: 121); likewise, Sonmi~451 remembers Luisa’s drop from the bridge near Swanekke Island, unable to “find its source in [her] own memories” (CA: 330). In other words, it is the act of remembering that now becomes the event, an iteration that is differentiated from acts of description and reception by its own particular position in time and space – what Jacques Derrida calls a “singularity” (1994: 161). In this way, the narrative structure of Cloud Atlas foregrounds the function of memory in the flow of discourse, a strategy that seems to promise total recall, even as it exposes the impossibility of fully concretizing the past. At the same time, though, such a failure serves to illustrate the crucial singularity of each transmission, so to ring in what Derrida (1982: 21) describes as l’avenir – the future-to-come – a narrative that persistently, and by necessity, escapes our present imaginings. 120

As argued in Chapter 2 of this study, ghostwritten presents narrative as an uncanny and perplexing interchange of numerous first-person voices, while the reading of number9dream in the third chapter suggests that narrative is the ambiguously intertextual development of a single, subjective complex of perspectives. Both these texts draw attention to the multivalent make-up of narrative, especially with regard to its discursive qualities, and the way in which a reader is, uneasily, obliged to account for the peculiar paradox of narrative partaking of both literary truths and the truths of lived experience.74 The double life of narrative – where the subject is one of many readers in reality, but for now the only reader of the text – problematizes the place of ‘the’ reader in the dynamics of writing and reading, demanding that the definite article be placed under question. Such slippage then spills over into the very operations of textuality: as I sought to demonstrate in Chapter 2, a reading subject is incessantly shifting positions between (being, becoming) writer, narrator-protagonist, and ‘the’ reader – in literature as well as in life – without ever fully relinquishing her ties to any of these functions. Hence readers75 are constantly featured as visitors to the text, each one never completely at home, at best what Derrida would call “a full presence which is out of play” (1970: 2). As a result, ‘the’ reader never totally materializes; her presence is continually deferred so that she becomes, in the words of Buse and Scott when they discuss Derridean deconstruction, “a cipher of iteration”76 – a ghost (1999: 11) – and her every act of reading, a visitation. This reader exemplifies Derrida’s argument regarding the supplement of copula, that one’s being does not guarantee one’s being present, and that temporality is predicated on the “always-already” (in Fisher 2013: 44). Thus the present bears (or is haunted by) traces of what went before, as well as of what is to come – so that “haunting is the state proper to being as such” (ibid.). In Cloud Atlas this troubled state of being is manifest in the novel’s erratic narrative structure, which is broadly similar to that of its predecessors, and of

74 Unsurprisingly, these categories are hardly ever identical, much as they may overlap (as, for example, in a palimpsest). 75 Apart from indicating the large variety of different readers of texts, at different times (in the past, present, and future), this term also refers to the different readers that one reader may be (have been, became, will become) over time. This means that when I speak of ‘readers’, I implicitly rely on Derrida’s descriptions of iteration and singularity. 76 This characteristic is also indicative of ‘the’ reader being constitutionally resistant to the end-stopped definition of the definite article.

121 ghostwritten in particular, but depicts more overtly the subject-as-reader/recipient when each fragment is ‘read’ by the protagonist of the next one. The novel’s layout is, upon a first reading, difficult to define, consisting as it does of six nested stories presented in eleven segments, where five of the stories are split in two and only the sixth one, at the centre of the book, is uninterrupted. To add to this, each of the first five fragments is set in a different place and a different time, starting on the Pacific Ocean around 1850 and progressing in time to the post-apocalyptic future described in the sixth story. After this story, the narrative returns in reverse order – in a sort of palindromic operation – to each time and place to complete each account in turn, so to end off where it started. Thus, in what could be described as a wormhole effect, the sixth piece is both the midpoint and the terminus of the narrative. At the same time, however, the fact that the second fragment of the first, perhaps originary story is at end of the book would suggest that this endpoint is a mirage, an alterable space where origins and endings once again converge. The narrative therefore seems to be attempting to rehash the past in order to validate the sense of an ending, but because the ‘past’ of each story is continuously projected as a future reading – a memory remembered before the event, so to speak – the reversion in time merely serves to emphasise the impossibility of solidifying past events. On the whole, this structure reminds a reader that time is fragmented, both inside and outside of the text, and that even the future is an effect of remembering. Importantly, however, this realization occurs only after the completion of a first reading; the way in which a reader’s insight develops, then, can best be seen in a précis of the sequence in which the events occur. So the first fragment, entitled “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing”, is set on the Pacific in the mid-1800s, and contains the journal entries of Adam Ewing, a notary from California who is on his way home from the remote Chatham Islands near New Zealand. Pivotal to the outcome of his story is Ewing’s encounters with fellow traveller Dr Henry Goose, the young crewman named Rafael, and the Moriori slave Autua. However, before such an outcome can begin to emerge, the journal cuts off mid-sentence with the name “Rafael” (CA: 39) – though not before reference to a comet-shaped birthmark on Ewing’s chest – and a turn of the page bafflingly announces the title of the next fragment, “Letters from Zedelghem”. This section turns out to contain missives penned in 1931 by the bisexual Robert Frobisher – a musically gifted layabout and wastrel, though oddly likeable – to his 122 occasional lover Rufus Sixsmith, describing the former’s underhanded efforts to become amanuensis to the famous conductor Vyvyan Ayrs who lives in Chateau Zedelghem in Belgium. In between his adulterous affair with Ayrs’s wife Jocasta and hankering in droll Keatsian fashion after their daughter Eva, Frobisher is closely involved in Ayrs’s composition of a new symphony, for which the conductor is taking all the credit. Importantly, these letters, apart from evincing Frobisher’s burgeoning love for Eva and his growing frustration with Ayrs’s duplicity, mention his discovery of one half of a journal, which we eventually come to realize is Adam Ewing’s; equally significant is Frobisher’s reference to the “birthmark in the hollow of [his] shoulder [that] resembles a comet” (CA: 85). His chain of communication ends, apparently more decisively than the previous fragment, with a description of the first bonfires of autumn; the next page proclaims, again somewhat confusingly, a section entitled “Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery”. This third piece consists of a third-person narrative (where the previous two were in the first-person) that is set in Buenas Yerbas, California, in the 1970s. Journalist Luisa Rey is investigating reports of nefarious goings-on at Seaboard Corp, involving their new nuclear reactor; when she finds herself trapped by coincidence77 in an elevator with the aforementioned Rufus Sixsmith, now a scientist employed by Seaboard Corp, his guarded references confirm her suspicions. After Sixsmith’s apparent suicide (in reality, he is murdered by Seaboard CEO Alberto Grimaldi’s henchman, Bill Smoke) Luisa poses as Sixsmith’s niece in order to get at the report that would expose Seaboard; instead, she is given the first nine letters sent to Sixsmith in 1931 by Frobisher, whence she learns of the composer’s musical series entitled Cloud Atlas Sextet,78 while also coming across mention of the birthmark that they have in common. The crucial report, meanwhile, is now in the possession of another Seaboard employee, nuclear engineer Isaac Sachs. Sachs, fearing for his own life, is reluctant to openly hand over the incriminating evidence, but leaves Luisa with clues that he has hidden it in the trunk of her VW Beetle. The story seems to reach its end, much more conclusively so than the two previous ones, with Luisa’s being killed when Bill

77 As I pointed out in the previous chapters, coincidence is a spin-off of the uncanny, and not at all coincidental. 78 Significantly, the arrangement of this opus – six nested solos – tantalizingly resembles that of the novel. Such mimicry may leave a reader to ponder how the habitual play between mimesis (art imitating life) and anti-mimesis (life imitating art) is deconstructed by the postmodern operations of art imitating art. 123

Smoke rams his car into hers while she is speeding away from Swannekke Island, and sends her plummeting off a bridge. In what therefore appears to be a more conventional textual arrangement, the next page heralds the fourth piece, “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish”, set around the start of this millennium, and comprising said Cavendish’s memoir about the events that led to his enforced stay at the nursing home called Aurora House. (Significantly, in the build-up to the main account Cavendish comments on a manuscript, received in the mail, for a novel entitled Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery, which he dismisses as being too “artsily- fartsily Clever” (CA: 164). Also significant is that there is no reference to a birthmark in Cavendish’s memoir.) He proceeds to describe how, by a macabre stroke of luck,79 his heretofore lukewarm career as editor hots up when his client, gangster and memoirist Dermot Hoggins, publicly murders an overly outspoken critic, leading to a sharp rise in sales of Dermot’s book Knuckle Sandwich. However, Cavendish neglects to share the ensuing royalties with Dermot, and ends up being hounded by the Hoggins brothers, who are demanding Dermot’s share of a pound of flesh that Cavendish no longer has. Cavendish asks for help from his brother Denholme,80 who directs him to seek refuge at Aurora House in Hull; once there, Cavendish realizes that he has been misled, that the place he had thought was a hotel is a nursing home, and that all autonomy has been taken away from him by the iron-fisted rule of Nurse Noakes. He feverishly plots to escape, but to no avail – his story, and his life, seems to be cut short when he unexpectedly succumbs to a stroke, the next fragment, “An Orison of Sonmi~451”, apparently initiated by his final thought: “the old world came to an abrupt end” (CA: 183). As if in continuance of Cavendish’s fading impression, the fifth story is set in a new world some time in the near future, depicting an appalling capitalist Utopia called Nea So Copros – a future version of Korea (CA: 291) – where the rule of giant corporations stratifies society according to the remorseless demands of consumerism. The lowest level of this society is populated by “fabricants”, a breed of insensate clones programmed for a single end: to serve the customer. Their only reward is the sleep-inducing “Soap” (189) and the promise of “Xultation” where “Papa Song’s golden Ark” takes them to Hawaii to live out their lives as “busy, well-

79 Once again, this development is evidence of the workings of the uncanny in narrative. 80 This is the same Denholme Cavendish that we encounter(ed) in part three of ghostwritten. 124 dressed consumers” (190). In this fragment, the fabricant Sonmi-451 is being interviewed on the eve of her execution by a man known only as Archivist, who records their exchange in holographic format. Sonmi-451 relates the circumstances under which she had "ascended" – that is, had gradually become more cognizant of the world and her place in it – to be liberated from Papa Song’s, the fast food outlet where she had been incessantly labouring, by an abolitionist group called Union who take her to Taemosan University. (Her ascension is not Sonmi’s only anomaly: Archivist is surprised when she reveals that she has a birthmark (204) in the shape of a comet.) With the help of a student named Hae-Joo Im, Sonmi develops her intellect and perception through all available means, which includes watching a “disney”, or film, based on Timothy Cavendish’s memoir. However, before she can finish her viewing, corporation enforcers known as Unanimity burst in to take Sonmi into custody while Hae-Joo enigmatically informs her that he is not who she thought him to be. A reader would then turn to the next page and, not having learnt from previous experience, would expect this mystery to be explained, only to find herself rather sheepishly equivocating between being surprised, and yet not surprised, by a new story entitled “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After”. This sixth section presents a narrative that appears to be a reversion in time – the account takes the form of a fireside tale told in language that is idiomatic and oddly defective – but it soon becomes clear that the story is set after the “Fall” in some post-apocalyptic future in which almost all of humankind’s technological knowledge has become defunct. The protagonist-narrator of this story is the old man Zachry Bailey who, in addition to explaining that “[v]alleysman only had one god an’ her name it was Sonmi” (CA: 254), tells of momentous events in his past: the murder at Sloosha’s Crossin’ of his father and brother by Kona warriors when he was nine years old, the bi-annual trade visits of the “Great Ship o’the Prescients” (258), and the time when the Prescient woman Meronym81 came to stay with his family in the Nine Valleys of the Big I (which we understand to be the Hawaii of the future). Meronym is a highly intelligent being who possesses awe- inspiring technology, including an egg-shaped device called an orison that responds to touch and contains holographic recordings. One such recording is of a

81 A reader is suddenly reminded of the meronymic arrangement of stories in ghostwritten, and the way in which it presents a catalogue of the larger human tendency to narrativize. This link between the two novels craftily serves to reinforce the idea first mooted in Mitchell’s debut novel, that the salvation of humankind lies in the stories that we tell. 125

“ghost-girl” (277) that Meronym later identifies as Sonmi, who was no god but just a “freakbirthed human” (291). On the day that Meronym is supposed to return to her ship, Kona warriors attack and kill most everyone, taking Zachry into slavery, where he is tortured and brutalised.82 Meronym eventually manages to save Zachry, and it is revealed that the Prescient ship will not be returning to Big I because the plague had wiped out all but five of them; Zachry and Meronym are to go to Ikat's Finger, where they can board kayaks to Maui in order to escape the marauding Kona. On their way there, while hiding from a band of raiding Koona, Zachry glimpses a "whoahsome wyrd birthmark jus' b'low [Meronym's] shoulder blade" (319). The piece ends with Zachry's unnamed son questioning the truth of his deceased father’s tales; the one fact that he can confirm, though, is the existence of the orison, which was found in Zachry’s belongings after his death. Though no one can understand what she says, they often “wake up the ghost-girl jus’ to watch her hov’rin ‘n ‘shimm’rin’” (325). Now, in another baffling move, rather than initiating a new tale, the novel returns to the story of Sonmi-451, which a reader had assumed had been concluded on that open-ended – what could perhaps be called radically postmodern – note. It is as if Zachry’s descendants had touched the orison to re- awaken “the ghost-girl”, and the interrogation resumes as if it had never been interrupted: enforcers have beset the university and are searching for Sonmi and Hae-Joo, who are forced to abandon “Timothy Cavendish to his unknown fate” (329) and flee. Hae-Joo confesses that he is a member of Union come to enlist Sonmi’s help in staging a revolution that pivots on "engineering the simultaneous ascension of six million fabricants" (342). After Sonmi is “refaced” (337), the two of them travel into the wastelands surrounding the city, where Sonmi witnesses the terrible atrocities perpetrated in the name of “corpocracy” (342): one of these is the murder of a fabricant child, by callously throwing her off a bridge, whose use as a grossly expensive toy had become obsolete when the customer’s spoilt daughter changed her mind. The most abominable of these atrocities, however, is the truth about Xultation: rather than earning a happy retirement in Hawaii, fabricants are killed and their body parts repurposed in the next batch of clones, or used as a source of low-cost protein in the Soap imbibed by fabricants, and even in the food

82 The scenes described here evoke the depiction, in the first fragment, of Autua’s torture (CA: 60), with all of the outwardly spreading ripples of iteration they contain. 126 devoured by consumers. (This scenario is intriguingly foreshadowed in Timothy Cavendish’s reference in the first fragment of his memoir to “Soylent Green” (179), an allusion to the SF film in which the protagonist discovers that the main ingredient of a new high-energy nutrient is human flesh.) Sonmi agrees to join Union in their efforts to overthrow the corporations: she manages to write her declarations before Unanimity seizes her for execution. Sonmi’s last request is to finish her viewing of “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish” which she had started "when, for an hour in [her] life, [she] knew happiness" (365). As in the previous fragment, the narrative seems to simulate the role of a reader/recipient – this time in Sonmi’s viewing of the film “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish” – when it immediately takes up where it left off in the fourth fragment. Cavendish has survived his stroke, but in addition to being left helpless and half paralysed, completely reliant on the nursing home staff, he has also lost his memory. When, after many weeks, he starts recovering and remembering how he came to be at Aurora House, he has to accept that no-one is coming for him, not even the Hoggins brothers. His own brother Denholme was the only one who had known of Cavendish’s whereabouts, and he was now dead; Cavendish seems to have no choice but to live out his life as one of “the Undead” (374). In a seemingly guileless sidelong reference, he rediscovers in his belongings the manuscript of Half-lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery and sets about editing it, deciding that some “things will have to go: the insinuation [based on a shared birthmark] that Luisa Rey is this Robert Frobisher chap reincarnated, for example” (373). Cavendish points out that he himself cannot be anyone’s reincarnation even if he too has a birthmark – significantly, this argument is borne out when we take into account that Luisa Rey was in all likelihood still alive when Cavendish was reading the manuscript. In any event, Cavendish’s enterprise is thwarted when “the ruddy manuscript ran out of pages” (373). Meanwhile, he discovers kindred spirits in Ernie Blacksmith and Veronica Costello; they come up with a plan to escape that, succeeding against all odds, sees Cavendish end up comfortably ensconced in an Edinburgh hotel, living large off the royalties from the film version of Knuckle Sandwich while writing his memoir, which he plans to turn “into a film script of his own” (403). He ends off his account with the noteworthy information that he had received the second half of the Half-lives manuscript (403); as with the previous

127 fragments, we join Cavendish in reading, in the following section, the second part of Luisa’s story. Luisa survives the attempt on her life, forcing her way out of the sinking car, but fails to recover the Sixsmith report. She desperately searches for other evidence that would serve to incriminate Seaboard, leading to her being unremittingly hunted by the company’s henchman, Bill Smoke, and having to evade numerous murder attempts. Luisa is eventually offered assistance by Joe Napier, the man who had once saved her father's life; together they manage to track down a second copy of the report, hidden aboard Sixsmith's yacht Starfish. In a style typical to the crime thriller (what Sixsmith calls (95), in the first fragment of this story, a “contrivance”), Bill Smoke suddenly appears, and shoots Napier; before he dies, Napier shoots Smoke, and they both die. Luisa, however, lives, and goes on to publicize the report. Her story ends with her receiving the last eight of Robert Frobisher’s letter in the mail, still convinced that she is his reincarnation. Along with Luisa, we read how Frobisher’s love for Eva continues to grow alongside his hatred for her father. Refusing to continue working for Ayrs with him refusing to share the credit, Frobisher steals Ayrs's pistol, possibly to pawn it for some ready cash, and flees Zedelghem to stay in a hotel in Bruges. It is here that he starts composing his masterpiece, Cloud Atlas Sextet, in between writing passionate love letters to Eva. Convinced that she loves him, though she never responds to his letters, Frobisher arrives unannounced at a party in Zedelghem, to spirit Eva away. He is met by none other than her fiancé – the dejected Frobisher returns to the hotel to finish his sextet, after which, in a bizarrely post-mortem description,83 he commits suicide with Ayrs’s pistol. In his penultimate letter, he mentions finding the second half of Adam Ewing’s journal. Together with Frobisher, we pick up Ewing’s story again, learning that the Prophetess had docked at Bethlehem Bay, where Ewing encounters the European inhabitants who are, in characteristic colonialist fashion, either missionaries or slave traders. Back on the ship, Ewing’s health continues to deteriorate despite Henry Goose’s tender ministrations. Ewing finally realizes something that readers had known (unfairly) since Frobisher first mentioned it (retrospectively) in the second fragment – Goose has been feeding him poison all along, aiming to

83 There is a trace here of the death-in-life condition witnessed by Eiji, the protagonist of number9dream, in his boss Mr Aoyama’s suicidal plunge (n9d: 89). 128 impersonate him after his death. Autua saves Ewing after Goose leaves him for dead, carrying him to a nunnery where he is nursed back to health. Having been saved by a freed slave, Ewing vows to devote his life to the Abolitionist movement. His pledge expresses a promise for the future: “A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living” (528). And although we suspect that his undertaking has already failed – as is evident in the post-apocalyptic world inherited by Zachry – there remains a sense of optimism when Zachry’s son, as a conclusion to Zachry’s story, encourages a reader to keep returning to the past, to “look” again and again (325), perhaps in the hopes of realizing a future – not the one that has already been foreseen (as, perhaps in a first reading of the text), but the one which cannot be foreseen because it changes with every reading: a future-to-come. At the end of the novel, then, readers are left bemused as to how to describe the narrative structure of this text. One possibility is presented in the second half of Luisa Rey’s story, where scientist Isaac Sachs muses on the nature of time: One moment 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).

Isaacs’s description of the intricacies of temporality is strikingly similar to Derrida’s view of time, where he distinguishes between what one calls the Future and “l’avenir”. The future is that which – tomorrow, later, next century – will be. There is a future which is predictable, programmed, scheduled, foreseeable. But there is a future, l’avenir (to come) which refers to someone who comes whose arrival is totally unexpected. For me, that is the real future. That which is totally unpredictable. The Other who comes without my being able to anticipate their arrival. So if there is a real future, beyond the other known future, it is l’avenir in that it is the coming of the Other when I am completely unable to foresee their arrival (1982: 21).

One could say that this is what the matrioshka-doll structure of Cloud Atlas aims to envisage (albeit, by necessity, imperfectly) the “real future”, l’avenir, where the overall wholeness insinuated by the embeddedness of each fragment –the programmed and predictable future– is countered by their unexpected and violent

129 disruption by “the Other” – another subject –84 whose arrival could not have been anticipated. This configuration also brutally deranges a reader’s complacent linear experience of the text, serving starkly to exaggerate the mechanics of a “real” reading experience. Conventionally, a reader anticipates that a story will be self- contained and seamless, like the outward appearance of a matrioshka doll, so that she falls into the practice – as described by Wolfgang Iser, and discussed in Chapter 1 – of continually modifying her interpretation to allow for and assimilate disruptions. Over time, these modifications may start going unnoticed, creating an impression that reading, overall, is seamless. The stop-and-start narrative structure of Mitchell’s novel then forces a reader to acknowledge how, habitually, her own reading practice is similarly marked by sudden and severe breaks and disconnections. Consequently, she is reminded of the fact, which is usually relegated to the back of the mind, that hardly any reading occurs in one sitting, and that even if it should, such a reading is constantly disturbed by recollections of other, sometimes unrelated discourses. This fact in turn highlights the unavoidable inadequacy of the matrioshka analogy85 (even if, in the foreword to the 2012 eBook edition, Mitchell himself uses it to describe the book): this text transcends the predictableness of the doll’s structure, much as a reading of the novel, and perhaps of all novels, by virtue of dialogic interference overspills the fiat of genre. This kind of discoursal static is illustrated by the way in which the narrative structure of Cloud Atlas syncopates between genres. In what could perhaps be seen as an evolution of the technique introduced in ghostwritten, here each fragment is more clearly recognizable as a journal record, an epistolary account, a crime novel, a memoir, a holographic film, an oral tale. This design foregrounds more emphatically than before the discursive qualities – that is, the tendency to overspill any given context – of narrative, and the liminal space – the space where the origins and the ends of discourses converge – inhabited by a reading subject. In fact, as I will seek to demonstrate in part two of this chapter, in this novel the ghost-like subject becomes the point of this convergence, a haunted site where the

84 As before, and hereafter, this ‘subject’ is the narrator-protagonist, the topic of the narrative, the reader, and even the writer, individually, and all at once. 85 Patrick O’Donnell argues in his 2015 study that the Russian Doll structure of the novel suggests “an investment in mirroring and symmetry that runs counter to the image of history in the novel conveyed as a series of partial stories serendipitously linking mediated identities across scattered spaciotemporal reaches and domains” (75). 130 ever-changing signs of reading, writing, and narrating restlessly collect and disperse. At this juncture, the exigencies of time are not only moot, but mutable, because in the figure of the ghost, we see that past and present cannot be neatly separated from one another, as any idea of the present is well constituted through the difference and deferral of the past as well as anticipations of the future (Buse & Scott, 1999: 11).

At the same time, though, and in the manner of all discourse, a sense of continuity is maintained throughout the novel: the narrative provided by, or centred on, the protagonist of one fragment is ‘read’, in a mode different from its own, by the protagonist of the next one. Such continuity is, in part, signalled by the recurring birthmark, and the way in which the text seems to suggest that each protagonist is a reincarnation of the one before. Mitchell himself comments (“Bookclub”, BBC Radio 4, June 2007) that “all of the main characters, except one,86 are reincarnations of the same soul in different bodies throughout the novel identified by a birthmark [in the shape of a comet]”. This remark is apparently corroborated by Zachry in the ‘final’ story when he observes (CA: 324) that souls “cross ages like clouds cross skies, an’ tho’ a cloud’s shape nor hue nor size don’t stay the same it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul”. To add to this, the motif of the comet is not at all new – it is itself a reincarnation, or re-embodiment, of an idea conceived of by Mitchell in ghostwritten, developed throughout that novel as a recurrent image, and left looming in its final paragraph. Nevertheless, despite this preponderance of evidence, there are certain indications that the prevalence of this sign might be a thematic red herring, one designed to send a reader off on a hunt for meaning, all the while drawing attention to the sometimes mulish demand by readers for any kind of meaning, however contrived. The most obvious repudiation of the theme of reincarnation is when in the second half of Timothy Cavendish’s story, he dismisses it out of hand (CA: 373). Another, more subtle indication of this refutation is the fact that the symbolic rule of succession, where the birthmark is inherited by the next main character in line, is broken in the final story. Here the legacy is conferred, not on its protagonist Zachry, but on the visiting Meronym, the last of humanity’s now defunct techno-

86 The exception is Zachry, the narrator-protagonist of the sixth, and only coherent, story. Here, the birthmark is worn by Meronym, a visitor to Zachry’s tribe, a representative of the last vestiges of humanity’s former techno-sophisticated civilization. 131 sophisticated civilization. Such a breach suggests that the privileged sign of continuity is destined for extinction, and that the rule of reincarnation is coming to an end, if indeed there ever was such a rule. Along with this ending, however, comes a beginning, as the human race endures in Zachry’s children, and in its resumption of a newly imagined pre-technological existence. In other words, the thematic emphasis shifts to the way in which the attempts by a reader to find a particular meaning in individual readings are continually deflected and redirected by other discourses, so as to give rise to other unlooked for meanings. Paradoxically, then, this thematic thread of the novel in a sense still involves reincarnation, but in a metaphoric way in which the meanings of discourse –its “soul”, so to speak– keeps returning in different forms. In other words, the reincarnation of souls has less to do with the characters than it has with the premise of each character’s story. The reincarnation of themes thus involves the way in which the principal figure of each fragment is made present in the one that follows, in l’avenir, albeit – in accordance with the Derridean understanding of presence – as an absence. Moreover, in line with the deconstructive operations of time mentioned above, each protagonist is also already ‘preserved’ as a reader-to-come, prefigured in the main character of the preceding fragment.87 In this way, the narrative structure of the novel strives to uphold equally the past, the present, and the future, a function which is remarkably similar to the process of archiving, to what Marlene Manoff in her overview of the archive88 describes as “the drive to collect, organize and conserve the human record” (2004: 11) and through conserving, concretize what is, what was, and what will be. In view of this, Cloud Atlas can be read as an endeavour to mimic the archival enterprise; at the same time, it may also be seen as an attempt to account for the archival drive.89 In addition hereto, the novel then enacts the signification of the word “archive” as Derrida (1995: 9) understands it, as both “commandment” (the principle according to the law, relating to archivization

87 The principal figure is therefore not only the writer or teller of its own story, but also, at some other time that is by virtue of the trace at the same time this time, a character in and a reader/recipient of someone else’s story. 88 I refer to the archive in a metaphorical sense here, fully cognizant of the fact that the metaphor cannot encompass a full “understanding of archives as real institutions, as a real profession […], and as a real discipline with its own set of theories, methodologies, and practices (Schwarz & Cook, 2002: 2). 89 One could argue that, on a certain level, the drive to collect discoursal relics is intimately involved with the inclination to narrativize, which I discuss in Chapter 2. 132 as documentation, which allows for “the condition for the possibility of the archive”), and “commencement” (the principle according to nature or history, “the originary, the first, the principal, the primitive”). Broadly speaking, these aspects are both related to memory: commencement involves the mental effort of remembering, where each singular attempt is also the “first” of its kind in a particular space and time (taking into account that access to any memory is always, necessarily, inchoate), while commandment involves, as a physical occasion in itself, the articulation of a memory, which is also, inevitably and uneasily, a linguistic event (speaking and writing, listening and reading). From another perspective, it could be said that in the writing and reading of literature, commandment involves the laws of genre (which, to some extent, articulate how writing and reading is done),90 whereas commencement relates to the mental operations that configure both processes of writing and reading, insofar as these processes are also acts of remembering. Remembering, then, is a less rigid affair than reading or writing about a memory, often digressing along more indulgent lines that seem mostly irrelevant. Writing about something, or reading about it, comprises what Derrida thinks of as acts of literature91 (though he never seems to use this phrase, as such), which J. Hillis Miller explains as “acts performed by literature, and at the same time acts that create or comment on literature” (2002: 58). Such operations require reader and writer (who could comprise one person) to work within the law laid down by genre; at the same time, however, they become distracted by the ways in which their singular activity serves to bend the rules in, as Roland Barthes would describe the activity (that is at once precipitated and perpetuated by the play of the signifier), “inventing ludic meanings” (1981: 37) which the law could not foresee. Derrida likewise refers to “invention” in literature which, as Hillis Miller notes, works in two ways: “invention that returns to the same” (what I refer to here as the law laid down by genre), “and the invention that responds to the call of the wholly other” (2002: 68). This second kind of invention initiates – or repeatedly relaunches – in the text

90 This is somewhat oversimplified, in that genre also lays claim to historical origins, thus falling under commencement. 91 This idea came to the fore in Derrida’s presentation, “SignatureEventContext” (1971), where he takes issue with J.L. Austin’s contention – also adopted by John Searle – that literature does not belong in the sphere of “felicitous” speech acts because it is untethered from a realistic or “serious” context. Derrida demonstrates that the iterability of the sign is intrinsic to all signifying systems, which serves to transcend context and to outmode the distinction between “felicitous” and “non-felicitous” speech acts. 133 a ceaseless negotiation between commandment and commencement. In this way, a space opens up where a subject – writer, reader, protagonist-narrator – comes into view as an entity that encompasses, in Derrida’s words, “two types of transgenerational memory or archive […] the memory of an ancestral experience, or [that of] the so-called biologically acquired character” (1995: 27). This subject harbours the site where origin and enterprise intersect, where, as shown in earlier chapters, the origins and the ends of discourses converge. Consequently, the subject becomes, in a sense, both the archive (arkhē) and its iterations, with a reading subject in particular embodying this restive ebb and flow of memory and meaning-making. Such a troubled subjectivity recalls Derrida’s description of “archivization”, the incessant process in which the “archive always works, and a priori, against itself” (14) inasmuch as “archivization produces as much as it records the event” (17). Implicit here is the idea that the event itself is changed, absurdly, by the same act that strives to (re)collect and conserve it unchanged, an inconsistency that represents what Derrida identifies as “the destructive force of deconstruction [that] is always already contained within the very architecture of the work” (1986: 153). One could therefore say that the arkhē does not represent what it ostensibly represents: the scene that it preserves is only the one found in the mind of the viewer, the reader, a reader – and this scene is only found there by this reader, who in turn cannot express it without changing it once again. This notwithstanding, we keep revisiting the archive to presumably discover some sense of our history, which could possibly explain our present and teach us about, or prepare us for, our future. Derrida refers to “archive fever”: the “compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement” (1995: 57). This place may even be the one that marks the first moment in and of history, the inaugural event in our past that began our history. However, this foundational moment, while it may be – or at some elusive point was – possible, is made inaccessible for now by the same archival structure that seems to promise the concreteness of the past. The objects, or images, or words that presumably guarantee the presence of the past are no more than iterable characters that paradoxically only serve to affirm the absence of the past, an “immemorial past” that had never been present in the first place (Derrida 1998: 134

118). That past moment, and the possibility of its presence, is thus deferred to the future, not the predictable Future as scheduled, but a future-to-come which “will never be a production or a reproduction in the form of presence” (Derrida 1982: 21). Writing as production therefore decentres its own preservation of the archive together with the archive itself, while yet ensuring the archive’s survival, albeit in unpredicted ways. Evident in this double gesture is the idea that “the hesitation between writing as decentering and writing as an affirmation of play is infinite. This hesitation is part of play and links it to death” (Derrida 1978: 375). This is why, as Derrida explains, “the structure of the archive is spectral. It is spectral a priori: neither present nor absent “in the flesh,” neither visible nor invisible, a trace always referring to another whose eyes cannot be met” (1995: 54). This means that a subject – which is a reader, for now – if seen as representing both the archive and its iterations, is spectral in her make-up, kept from looking into the eyes of the other – who is the writer, the narrator, the character, other readers – and, shying away from the certainty of her own death (or at least the death of her present incarnation), incapable of looking the other – who is the Other, none other than herself – in the eye. Upon concluding a first reading92 of Cloud Atlas, then, a hesitant reader will perhaps realize that the archival project described in the novel does not present what it seems to represent. In other words, while apparently being a collection of historical fragments that, as I will argue in the next part of this chapter, pinpoint the history and evolution of the Novel so as to explain its current state and its upcoming prospects, the book envisages a future that reverts to pre-history, to a time before writing, before Derrida’s rethinking of Plato’s pharmakon that can only, ironically, be rendered here in writing (which is in its own way another kind of reading). In this, we are reminded of Derrida’s description of writing as “a nonsymmetrical division designated on the one hand the closure of the book, and on the other the opening of the text” (1978: 371). Such a division is evident in the narrative structure of Cloud Atlas, where “the closure of the book” – that is, the end of the story – occurs twice in five of the stories, before and after each one being interrupted. Curiously, “the opening of the text” – the continuation of significationary processes – also seems to happen twice: once after the conclusion of the last story

92 One could say that all readings, including re-readings, are first readings, by dint of the iterability of the sign. 135 when the other five stories each resume in its turn, and then again at the end of the book when the wholeness of each story is, apparently, recouped. However, it becomes clear that both these occasions had been a false lure, each a premature closure designed, perhaps, to gloss over the fragmented design of the archive, and sustain its pledge to concretize the past. So, reading on, it gradually emerges that this sixth story is the site on which the division between book and text hinges, and the prehistoric future that it describes the decentred locus of the novel’s archival enterprise. At the close of the book, then, a reader is made to return to the first fragment of each story in her own attempt to give tangible form to the history of this novel and its involvement in the rise of the Novel, while Derrida’s words run through her mind: “The return to the book is then the abandoning of the book; it has slipped in between God and God, the Book and the Book, in the neutral space of succession, in the suspense of the interval” (373).

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Part 2 Cloud Atlas: reading the future-to-come

The spectral reader emerging so timidly at the end of the first part of this chapter – the one who is suspended in the genre-crafted interval between “God” the Author and “God” the Reader – now has to abandon her linear Reading of the Book (which was never linear, in any case) and move to a “neutral space of succession” (Derrida 1978: 373) where, while yet accepting that time does not progress sequentially and that the future is a relic of the past, she needs to ask: what now, and what then? More precisely, now that she has read each story presented in Cloud Atlas in its entirety, the fact that the reading was dispersed over time and space compels her to build on what she has already learnt about the uncanny and intertextual characteristics of reading, perhaps to confirm a faint intuition that uncanniness and intertextuality are also features of the archive, the literary archive in particular, in this case. Concomitant to this is the thought that her own readings amount to an archival accumulation of countless discoursal scraps that keep adding on to her store of knowledge and information, a microcosmic reflection, maybe, of the “acts of literature” discussed in the first part of this chapter. Reading, then, along with all of the other activities concerned with the business of literature,93 is one of the acts that make up literary archiving, while the archive of literature itself comes into being by what is omitted, as much as by what is retained by all those so involved. In other words, the literary archive is structured around items or artefacts that in Derridean terms, as discussed in the previous part of this chapter, are “neither absent nor present ‘in the flesh’” (1995: 54), detectable only in the spectral traces they leave behind (or that foreshadow them). In this sense, the literary archive preserves remnants of a whole that was supposedly intact in times past, as if it is able to fully represent such integrality. Consequently, a reader is moved continually to revise her understanding of what it is that the literary archive displays, in the immemorial past as well as in a future-to-come, when it preserves certain representations. In the process, it may emerge how a reader herself becomes the archive and its endless iterations, the turbulent site

93 Such business includes the entire spectrum of pre- and post-publication matters, which lie outside the purview of my study, though there is reference to reading as editing in Timothy Cavendish’s job description. 137 where commencement – that is, originary events – and commandment – the iterative articulation of those events – intersect, coinciding with remembering, and expressions of remembering, in the act of reading.

4.2.1. The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing The very first sentence of the first fragment of Cloud Atlas has – as it had on a first reading, though perhaps going unnoticed then – a haunting familiarity: “Beyond the Indian hamlet, upon a forlorn strand, I happened on a trail of recent footprints” (CA: 3). Some rummaging around in her memory brings a reader to the realization that these words bear a trace of Robinson Crusoe’s description, in Daniel Defoe’s widely read novel, of finding “one day, about noon, […] the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen on the sand” (Defoe 2014 [1719]: 171). The footprint, itself a trace, brings with it a hail of information, one of the foremost pieces being that Defoe’s novel is regarded by a number of scholars to be the first of its kind in the history of English literature (Drabble 1996: 265), and often referred to as a foundational text in the evolution of the novel.94 Such a gesture institutes, in seeming innocence, the novelistic category of the literary archive in which the inauguration of the English novel can be scrupulously pinpointed as 25 April 1719 – the date on which Robinson Crusoe was published. In this way the fidelity of the archive is apparently confirmed through commencement – the principle according to “the originary, the first, the principal, the primitive” (Derrida 1995: 9), described in the first part of this chapter – by the opening sentence which greets a reader at the opening of the book. At the same time, it is an inaugural gesture that decrees the record of the rise of the English novel to be steadfast and predictable, and the scraps collected in Mitchell’s novel as a natural outcome of that venerable project.95 However, this placid train of thought is abruptly derailed when a reader remembers the ongoing debate about the origin of the English novel, one that is

94 As a matter of fact, it proves difficult to pin down the exact source of this description, which has evidently become, as may be inferred from studies such as Jo Alyson Parker’s (2011: 18, 38), a matter of common consensus. 95 Such complacency is also what underpins the formation of the canon, which is in itself an archival undertaking insofar as it preserves certain works as representative of literature. Much has been written about texts that ‘write against’ the imperial scheme of the canon, to which my present study cannot do justice. I raise this point only as it relates to Defoe’s novel, where J. M. Coetzee’s Foe is particularly relevant as a text that “writes back against Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719)” (Lane 2006: 18), a function that can possibly also be attributed to “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing”. 138 clouded by a number of classificatory issues. In terms of publication date, for example, and by virtue of its being a work of prose rather than poetry, as is wont at the time, Sir Thomas Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485) qualifies as the first English novel (Watt, 1957: np). However, there is also an argument to be made for Oroonoko (1688) by Apra Behn, described by Catherine Gallagher in her introduction to the 2000 edition (np), as the first attempt “to render the life lived by sub-Saharan African characters on their own continent”. Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), too, is put forward as a seminal text, for its depiction of what Arnold Kettle argues is “perhaps the first major plebeian heroine in English literature” (in Martin & Owens 1988: 136). In addition to all of these ‘firsts’ is Samuel Richardson,96 whose epistolary novel Pamela (1740) is extolled in 1914 by literary historian George Saintsbury (in Richardson 1914 [1740]: v) as “the ancestress of all English novels”. (The matter is even further complicated when Margaret Drabble (1996: 462) observes that “the novel form developed through the memoir-novel and the epistolary novel of the 16th and 17th cents [sic]”, upon which we discover (Drabble 1996: 210) that Apra Behn’s Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1683) predates Richardson’s epistolary novel by some sixty years). Such a process of unceasing iteration and vacillation is in line with Andrea Margaret Hurst’s argument (2008: 116-7), in her interpretation of Derrida’s description of the originary in the archive, that one assumes naively that the archive “begins” with the force of impression, that the beginning or commencement is a past present, “at once institutive and conservative.” Pressures imprint on substrates, making “for the first time” recognizable marks – traces inscribed in the psyche, circumcisions traced on the skin, footprints left in ash [my italics] – leaving lasting impressions, records, which condition the archivization to come and to which one may dream of returning, via the archive (here reduced to a mere hypomnesic supplement), at which point the archive becomes redundant.

So while this novel’s opening gambit is to invoke an originary event that makes “for the first time” a recognizable mark, the footprints left in the sand in Robinson Crusoe merely serve, in Cloud Atlas, as a record of absence. This act of literature in Mitchell’s novel subsequently provokes an anxious flurry of ‘firsts’ that would ostensibly legitimize the workings of the literary archive. However, the

96 To add to the confusion, “Richardson is generally agreed to be one of the chief founders of the modern novel. All his novels were epistolary, a form he took from earlier works in English and French” (Drabble: 857).

139 insistence on origins is precisely what lays bare the process of archivization – where the archive always works against itself, its action of recording the event turned to producing another similar-seeming event – which renders the representative purpose of each remnant inoperative. Moreover, another shortfall becomes evident insofar as the archival scheme inevitably relies on the excision of supposedly minor artefacts in favour of ones that are considered, by indeterminate design, to more appropriately reflect what literature is. On the whole, then, the act of preservation which is the object of archiving, hinges on the decimation of the lesser, who is also the other, while, importantly, erasing the injustice of that act of destruction, so that what is being preserved is not acts of literature, but acts that uphold the concept of literature. In this sense, the archival enterprise fails in its task; nevertheless, it is a failure that enables each fragment to be retained, none of them as the original but each as an original iteration, making way for an archival venture that is perhaps closer to the representative aim of the archive. Each of the literary firsts mentioned above thus gains its own singular authenticity, as does this opening fragment in Cloud Atlas. Each artefact also performs its own function in commemorating, not, as may conventionally be the case, the preservation of an inviolate literary form, but of the necessity to represent the change, both past and future, that this category of literature constantly undergoes in the present, in generic variations (such as the epistolary, crime fiction, memoir, and so forth),97 as well as in modal innovations. Hence the fragment found here does not represent what it seems to represent, to whit the past, and neither, by the same token, does the original – even in its absence – any longer. Now the gesture which attempts to articulate the concreteness of the past is the same one that reminds us of an immemorial past, one which cannot be represented or reproduced, and which forever lies in a future-to-come. This means that by invoking Defoe’s novel as an archival item, Cloud Atlas is at the same time invoking unforeseeable modal mutations that arise when looking to the future, as well as, strangely, when looking to the past. Such a procedure is described by Maria Beville, in her reading of Mitchell’s novel, as the “re-writing of the past as a plural space” (2015: 2). Hence, while Cloud Atlas does on one level preserve Robinson Crusoe as an original

97 An added dimension to this point is the fact that Defoe’s novel itself was initially taken to be a travelogue, its form later described as didactic and confessional. 140 artefact of sorts, on another it interrogates the unilateral preservation of certain excisional practices. Such interrogation effectively hinges on the iteration of the originary, insofar as the reference to Defoe’s novel also prompts a recall of the manifold themes it encapsulates. The opening part of Mitchell’s book touches on the moral and religious motifs in Robinson Crusoe, but in aid of developing the novel’s exposition of, in Sarah Dillon’s reading of the text, “predacity and its associated concerns of colonialism, abusive exploitation, slavery, and rampant consumerism” (2011: 10). Defoe depicts in his novel a kind of Utopia that, in colonialist terms, includes a model master-servant relationship between Crusoe and Friday, the “savage” whom Crusoe rescues from a band of cannibals, in which Friday can benefit from the enlightenment supposedly inherent in Western civilization. Significantly, however, this idyll ignores how such perfection relies on its being oblivious to its own over- privileged arrogance. It is this same stubborn insensibility that initially seems to promise, in Cloud Atlas, a comparably ideal relationship between Adam Ewing and Autua, the stowaway Moriori slave that Ewing saves from being cast overboard. However, such an untrammelled thematic concord is forestalled before it can be properly established, in that the footsteps in the sand that lead Crusoe to Friday, here bring Ewing face-to-face with the Englishman, Dr Henry Goose. Goose, who is later unmasked as Ewing’s would-be murderer, is in the grisly act of collecting human teeth left over from ancient cannibalistic feasts, which he uses, in a most profound expression of sordid consumerism, for the dentures he sells to the toothless rich in England. In effect, Defoe’s “noble savage” (CA: 12), the “not quite black” (Defoe 1719 [2014]: 226) heathen whose chance at redemption lies, in Crusoe’s view, in the very same moral ignorance that seems to damn him, is supplanted by the educated and enlightened white brute for whom base deliverance is found, by the admission of the gruesome Goose himself, in a “rapacity – for treasure, gold, spices & dominion, oh, most of all, sweet dominion” (CA: 508). In the archival enterprise of literature, therefore, Friday’s displacement by Goose serves to shift attention away from Crusoe’s blinkered utopianism to the grim realities of mercenary colonialist conquest that relies on, and results in, the displacement of the disempowered other. In light of this shift, the footprints found in Cloud Atlas preserve another absence which Robinson Crusoe, probably unwittingly, fails to represent: the 141 empty spaces left where so many histories, across the board, were annulled by the self-serving efforts to impose what Mr D’Arnoq98 the preacher tells Ewing (CA: 10) is “too much civilization”. (Intriguingly, Ewing draws further attention to the resemblances between his story and Robinson Crusoe when he declares (CA: 10) that D’Arnoq’s “spoken history […] holds company with the pen of a Defoe or Melville”.) The preacher’s words summon up all of the anti-colonialist critique that Defoe’s novel has attracted to date, possibly the earliest and still most incisive being James Joyce’s contention in 1912 (in Baines 2007: 30) that the true symbol of British conquest is Robinson Crusoe […] He is the true prototype of the British colonist, as Friday (the trusty slave who arrives on an unlucky day) is the symbol of the subject races. The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence; the unconscious cruelty; the persistence; the slow yet efficient intelligence; the sexual apathy; the practical, well-balanced religiousness; the calculating taciturnity.

As if in demonstration of Joyce’s description, D’Arnoq relates to Ewing the history of the Moriori people, whose ancestral home “since time immemorial”, Rēkohu, which “lay closer to More’s Utopia99 than [Western] States of Progress”, was “discovered” by the English and re-named Chatham Isle, colonized by “free settlers” both British and Maori, and the peaceable Moriori eventually annihilated by the warlike Maori, who had “proved themselves apt pupils of the English in ‘the dark arts of colonization’.” (CA: 12-14). Importantly, the preacher’s account is very similar to – iterative, in advance, of – the history related by Zachry in the sixth fragment, set in the far distant post-apocalyptic future, when “the Kona slaved the Mookini all southly” (CA: 253). The vertiginous effect of this iteration is to recall, but only in a second reading, both an immemorial past and a future-to-come in the same moment, so that differences in time and space are dissolved in what seems to be the perfect act of archiving. Nevertheless, such perfection is an illusion – the Moriori are not the Mookini, nor are “the dark arts of colonization” employed by the Maori to be interchanged with the murderous deeds of the Koona: these histories are striking in their similarity only because they are not the same. In this way the archive is found, once again, to work against itself, an act of archivization that

98 At the risk of overstating the ludic elements in Mitchell’s novel, and in view of the scene encountered by Ewing and Goose in the opening pages of Ewing’s journal, and referred to here on page 141, it may be interesting to note that D’Arnoq, read backwards, spells ‘Conrad’. 99 This reference is another roundabout critique of colonialism, and of Crusoe’s (and possibly Defoe’s) misconceived Utopia. 142 preserves a history, not of tribes or civilizations, but of the habit of the self to colonize the other in order to “civilize” it and reinvent it, an “invention of the same by which the other turns back into the same” (Derrida, in Hillis Miller 2002: 69). Too much civilization is something that Crusoe may well be guilty of when he condescendingly undertakes to save “the soul of a poor savage, and bring him to the true knowledge of religion and of the Christian doctrine” (Defoe 1719 [2014]: 242). Such arrogance is what will, according to the young missionary Wagstaff’s explanation to Ewing (CA: 506), eventually see “all beliefs turn to […] rats’ nests & rubble”, an image that resounds in Zachry’s description in the far-distant future, of how the “old dwellin’s [of the Mookini] in Hawi went to moss’n’ants” (CA: 253), and a sentiment that finds purchase when at the end of it all Zachry’s son is doubtful (CA: 324) of the truth of his father’s beliefs. With this in mind, it could even be argued that the absence which this first fragment, and Ewing’s story in its entirety upholds, is the absence of the truth, of what Ewing recognizes early on as “a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself” (CA: 17). Ewing himself can probably be seen as an imperfect simulacrum of Crusoe when, in one scene, he describes himself “tramp[ing] unsurveyed islands peopled by cannibals”, to be accidentally cast down the crater of Conical Tor on Chatham Isle, and left feeling like a “White trespasser in a heathen shrine” (CA: 20-21). In many ways Ewing, possibly because he comes from the “New World”, is a more enlightened version of Crusoe (though not entirely rid of all culturally inherited bias). While Crusoe does voice a critique of the now ill-famed 1492 Spanish conquest of the Americas, he remains oddly unperceptive of his own subjugation of Friday while repeatedly indicating that he is keenly aware of the “casual brutality lighter races show the darker” (CA: 31). Indeed, in line with the anti-colonialist sentiment invoked in the opening paragraph of Mitchell’s novel, Ewing’s story expresses a powerful denunciation of the colonial project as a whole when, only two or three pages later, he describes the place where he first encounters Autua: Passing below the Indian hamlet, a ‘humming’ aroused our curiosity & we resolved to locate its source. The settlement is circumvallated by a stake- fence, so decayed that one may gain ingress at a dozen places. A hairless bitch raised her head, but she was toothless & dying & did not bark […] In the hub of this village, a public flogging was underway. The slaves […] watched the punishment, making no response but that bizarre, bee-like ‘hum’. Empathy or condemnation, we knew not what the noise signified (6).

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The similarity between this scene and the one described by Charlie Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), when he first lays eyes on Kurtz’s encampment in the interior of the dark continent, is chilling. The wretched horror that Marlow feels when he witnesses the depravity spawned by the corrupting influence of ivory – by rampant consumerist appetite – is brought to the settlement where Ewing now finds (then found) himself, together with the ever-present sense of death and desperate decay that Marlow experiences throughout his journey into the interior, and the persistent aura of incomprehensibility which Marlow discerns when facing the indigenous people on the riverbank: “The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us – who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings” (Conrad 1902: 41). Hence the premise of complacent coloniality initially installed by references to Defoe’s book is overthrown by images recalled from Conrad’s novella, to expose the ruinous consequences of “too much civilization”, and the absence of truth at the heart of the Western world’s civilizing mission. In this way, therefore, the first fragment of Cloud Atlas, and its first story as a whole, commemorates another original event. Conrad is seen by some scholars, such as postcolonialist theorist Dominic Davies, as the first modernist writer to question the imperial project when his “sceptical critiques and literary interrogations of distinctly Eurocentric conceptions of morality and tradition do not come from within the metropolitan, bourgeois cityscape that was the home of so many self- fashioned, high Modernist authors” (Davies 2013: np). Hence the representation in Cloud Atlas of the themes found in Conrad’s novel not only preserves the moment that inaugurates a particular form of anti-colonialist protest, but also the first gesture of the kind of postcolonialist revolt in which Heart of Darkness, Davies argues, “marks the beginning of a century-long literary interrogation of what it is to exist in the colonies” (ibid.). Nevertheless, while Mitchell’s novel joins the postcolonialist debate, it is not subsumed by it. That is, it is not seduced by an anti-colonial righteousness in which, says novelist Caryl Phillips in her February 2003 interview with The Guardian, the price of someone like “Conrad’s eloquent denunciation of colonisation is the recycling of racist notions of the ‘dark’ continent and her people”. On the contrary, in reiterating the images from Defoe’s and Conrad’s texts, the

144 representations in Cloud Atlas consciously draw attention to such a recycling,100 and possibly also to its inexorableness. Crusoe unconsciously expresses his own complicity in perpetuating racist notions: “it came into my thoughts one day that all this might be a mere chimera of my own, and that this foot might be the print of my own foot, when I came on shore from my boat” (Defoe 1719 [2014]: 176). Crusoe’s words hint at another kind of recycling, that of the typical European coloniser. Implicit here is a sense of the act of recycling being an archival gesture, through which every one of the myriad discursive fragments that represent postcolonialist protest, is itself re-presented as an original artefact, each a singular event that combine to preserve, in Ewing’s words, as “many truths as [there are] men” (CA: 17). Within this polyveracious context, the figure of Autua gains particular significance. In the first fragment of Ewing’s story, Autua seems to stand in for the displaced Friday, if only by facile virtue of his being a dark-skinned slave, but as the account draws to a close in the second fragment, it is evident that a complicated and subtle series of role reversals had taken place on many levels. At the most obvious level, and as mentioned earlier, Friday (and, by extension, possibly also Autua) is replaced by Goose in a fairly straightforward thematic shift from colonialism to postcolonialism that, surprisingly, manages to resist the recycling that Phillips speaks of. Equally surprising is the subsequent reintroduction of the colonial stereotype in the form of Autua, but it is a stereotype that is rescinded when the latter takes over Crusoe’s role. Where in Defoe’s novel Crusoe is presented as Friday’s saviour, of both his body and his soul, in Cloud Atlas, although Ewing saves Autua from being thrown overboard, it is Autua who rescues Ewing, physically when carrying him to the nuns for medical care after Goose had left him for dead, and morally by moving him to “pledge [him]self to the Abolitionist cause” (CA: 528). However, the text then evades the mendacity of such an expedient exchange – one which sees the characteristics of the Friday-figure being reprocessed unchanged despite (or maybe because of) its being given a superior part to play – when Autua insists that Ewing “preserved” his own life by rescuing the former in the first place (CA: 526).

100 Phillips’s description echoes that of the perpetual recycling of the subject discussed in Chapter 2. 145

This corkscrew exchange of roles serves to outline the historic battle for supremacy between master and slave; more important may be that it also has the effect of dismissing the dialectic altogether (insofar as Hegel argues, as discussed in Chapter 3 Part 2 of this study, that the difference between these two binaries is effaced by the subject’s self-expression). In effect, the relation between master and slave is neutralized (instead of naturalized), offering the possibility of parity between self and other, of a coexistence like that witnessed by Ewing during his convalescence, in the “white faces, brown faces, kanáka faces, Chinese faces, mulatto faces” of orphan children peering at him over the wall of the adjacent “poor-house” (CA: 527). Ironically enough, though, Ewing’s vision is no less Utopian than Defoe’s, albeit more liberal: the ideal world of equality that Ewing hopes will come to pass is not the one described in Zachry’s account, in the sixth story, of warfare and enslavement and murder. Indeed, the final story of the novel is markedly similar to this first one, in narrative detail as well as in language use and style, as would strongly indicate that Zachry may be a descendant of Autua’s,101 if not genetically (in view of Autua’s being described (CA: 526) as “the last free Moriori in this world”), then metaphorically. Zachry, hunted and enslaved by cannibals, may even be the one to finally fill Friday’s footsteps, largely unaltered from his Defoenian predecessor but in a pre-colonialist context in which, in the immemorial past, Western ‘civilization’ had not yet been imposed and, in a future- to-come, will not be imposed because the colonisers of old are now extinct. So the book ends where it had started, with Ewing’s story, and the text, while it seems to follow suit, offers the prospect of a new original story – bringing to mind Derrida’s reference to the second form of literary invention that “can, through a merging of chance and necessity, produce the new of an event” (in Hillis Miller 2002: 68) – that would build on, and reconfigure, the archive. Such a possibility is illustrated in the doubly staged palindromic102 operation found in the narrative structure of this text, where time and place have collapsed, in a sense creating the “neutral space of succession” that Derrida refers to (1978: 373), in which the only moral ground to

101 On their meeting the second time, where Ewing discovers Autua in his cabin, the latter’s speech has the same pre-linguistic flavour as Zachry’s: “’You know I, you seen I, aye – you pity I.’ […] ‘If you no help – I in trouble dead.’” (CA: 27). 102 The palindromic structure of the novel also finds expression in the name ‘Autua’, which may imply that Zachry is Autua reincarnated, despite the text’s resistance to such a theme. Another, equally interesting effect here is to propose Autua/Zachry as the everyman that Crusoe is often seen to represent, resulting in another level of displacement, with the slave in the ascendant. 146 be won throughout millennia of human existence lies in the immemorial past and a future-to-come. Such a spacio-temporal collapse is evident in Ewing’s description of the first encounter between himself and Autua: Then a peculiar thing occurred. The beaten savage raised his slumped head, found my eye & shone me a look of uncanny, amicable knowing! As if a theatrical performer saw a long-lost friend in the Royal Box, and, undetected by the audience, communicated his recognition (CA: 6).

This event encompasses Derrida’s observation (2013: 5) that “one of the gestures of deconstruction is to not naturalize what isn’t natural – to not assume that what is conditioned by history, institutions, or society is natural,” (a sentiment echoed by Ewing when he asks (CA: 528), rhetorically, why we should “fight the ‘natural’ (oh, weaselly word!) of things”). As such, the reference to theatre and performance serves a dual purpose. The first is to frame the scene as an enactment, a contrivance “undetected by the audience”, and consequently perhaps most palpable to a reader as a calculatedly self-reflexive moment in the immediate wake of images from Conrad’s novella.103 Secondly, and simultaneously, the reference works to detach the encounter from its designated space and time to a precognitive interval that is the immemorial past as much as it is a future-to-come. That is to say, this moment is out-of-time, and the eye-to-eye exchange that it depicts spans all the ages that Mitchell’s novel as a whole attempts to portray. At the same time, though, this is a singular event where, as Derrida sees it, “the gaze of the other is not simply another machine for the perception of images. It is another world, another source of phenomenality, another zero degree of appearing" (2002: 121). Consequently, the allusions in Ewing’s journal, to Defoe’s and Conrad’s novels as well as to other literary fragments, are not cut-and-paste transfers; they are always already physical events in the emergent and eternally undiscoverable past, and present, and future, demonstrating Derrida’s contention that the question of the archive is not a question of the past. It is not the question of a concept dealing with the past that might already be at our disposal. An archivable concept of the archive. It is a question of the future, the question of

103 This scene also has the effect of reinterpreting the actions of Conrad’s “prehistoric man”: Autua’s gaze could be construed in terms of Marlow’s realization that “there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you…could comprehend…What was there after all?...who can tell? – but truth – truth stripped of its cloak of time” (Conrad 1902: 42). 147

the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise, and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive – if we want to know what that will have meant, we will only know in times to come; not tomorrow, but in times to come. Later on, or perhaps never (2013: 23).

So, as this first fragment ends unceremoniously with the words “when I first met Rafael” (CA: 39–my italics), we cannot know what this archive will have represented “in times to come”, in the second fragment, other than the preservation of the mixed-race boy (in that Ewing had quite a while earlier (7) made enigmatic mention of Rafael as if he had already been introduced, as if the past were “already at our disposal”). At the start of that second instalment, Rafael is described as the “sprite lad, aglow with excitement at his maiden voyage & so eager to please” (493–my italics) that he used to be, as if this Edenic state cannot be, even as a past condition. What is preserved, therefore, is the defilement of the innocent boy in a future that had already been written, the sexual abuse he unceasingly suffers at the hands of the brutish Dutchman Boerhaave104 and his compatriots a scaled-down reflection of the colonialist rapine of the day. Throughout the second part of his account, Ewing is haunted by Rafael’s subsequent suicide, which Ewing is convinced he had unknowingly sanctioned (CA: 518). Ironically, the issue is not whether Rafael had accepted Ewing’s phatic religious platitudes – in which resound Crusoe’s own misplaced messianic ends – as permission to take his own life, but that Ewing is oblivious to the arrogance of his assumption, in the first place, that the doctrine of his religion would have had any meaning for Rafael. Ewing is as guilty of the subjugation of the other as is Crusoe, even if (or maybe precisely because) they both meant well. Thus Ewing’s constant self-flagellation is evidence of what Derrida (2013: 16) identifies as the violence visited on the self, by itself, as it vehemently spurns the other, here under the cover of philanthropy.105 The representation of Christian charity offered by Ewing’s anguish therefore preserves, not selfless benevolence, but, in iteration of the self-deluded civilizing mission of the colonialist project, the mercenary drive behind such charity. The self then justifies itself when “it keeps and erases the archive of this injustice that it is, of this violence that it does” (2013: 16–my italics).

104 In another temporal distortion, this Boerhaave will appear (will have appeared) in Mitchell’s fourth novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010) which is set in a time thirty years earlier than the one described in Cloud Atlas. 105 This idea is graphically expressed in the description of Autua’s whipping, where Ewing “swooned under each fall of the lash” (CA: 6). 148

The archive – both the one(s) endorsed by communal consensus and the one(s) upheld in the mind of the self – can only exist because it is under constant erasure; as a result it is the effacement that is put on display, rather than the artefacts that attempt to commemorate a past that never was, entirely. Thus, as the name ‘Rafael’ is left hanging at the end of the first fragment, imprinting a portent of the boy later being found “hanged, steady as plumb-lead” (CA: 518), time, as Derrida would describe it, slips “out of joint” (2013: 16). The story, or history, represented through the archival operations evident in the first part of Ewing’s journal is not the one that the archive seems to preserve in light of the second part. Ewing himself finally comes to some understanding of this when he muses towards the end: “Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules; only outcomes” (CA: 527-8). In these terms, this first story of Cloud Atlas represents the outcomes of each discursive fragment that deals with the history of colonization; what it preserves, however, is the continual erasure of each fragment so as to foster an understanding that there cannot be one definitive history. Moreover, Ewing’s story also upholds the idea that, while “the many-headed hydra of human nature” (CA: 529) seems set in, and on, its ceaseless and violent vacillation between self-love and self-hatred, and that any attempt to effect meaningful change is “no more than one drop in a limitless ocean” (ibid.), this very limitlessness is what allows for the possibility of change in a future-to-come, for “what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?” (ibid.). As a reader slowly adjusts to the peculiar structure of the novel, then, she may find that each story she will encounter is another “drop” in a literary ocean, each account – as well as her reading of it – prismatically representing, not only the erasure of archival artefacts through various generic depictions, but also, radically, the effacement of each erasure. This double gesture transpires to be central to the continuation of the archive, because, as Ewing realizes at the last, we have to continue to “begin somewhere” (CA: 528). And this “somewhere”, since this is a literary artefact, lies with a reader – herself an archive of discoursal remnants that recall imperfect totalities – who keeps on tracking the footprints that lead to the next story (which, uncannily, is often also the one before).

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4.2.2. Letters from Zedelghem (and everything after)106 Having now, at the close of the book, gained some understanding of how the archive works, a reader proceeds by opening the text in order to find traces, in the immemorial past, of the acts of erasure through which the archive seeks to represent some truth in a future-to-come. The next artefact she encounters, entitled “Letters from Zedelghem”, is rendered in epistolary form which recalls, as she had already discovered, an originary event insofar as “the novel form developed slowly, through the memoir novel and the epistolary novel of the 16th and 17th cents [sic] to the novel of the omniscient third-person narrator, which has dominated from the late 18th cent [sic], to the present time” (Drabble 1996: 731). Further investigation leads to her finding that, as in her reading of the first story, the certainty of this foundational moment is called into question. Peter Logan, in his global historical account of the novelistic form, records that Diego de San Pedro’s Cárcel de amor (Prison of Love, 1492), though described in the main as a sentimental novel (Logan 2014: 319), is perhaps the first proper epistolary novel by dint of its replacing dialogue with monologues and speeches, as well as letters. What peaks a reader’s interest even further is the subject matter of de San Pedro’s text. The protagonist Leriano has fallen in love with the heir to the Macedonian throne, princess Laureola, and plies her with letters expressing his affection; after a number of narrative twists, it transpires that Laureola is duty-bound to deny Leriano’s love, at which point he opts to die. Leriano’s story is tantalizingly, and uncannily, similar to Robert Frobisher’s, to the extent that a reader may be tempted to believe that this fragment continues smoothly to build on the archival enterprise introduced in the opening story, where the concept of the originary is immediately erased in order to reveal how the archive represents various forms of absence. Such effacement is clear when, for example, Frobisher questions the “authenticity” of Adam Ewing’s journal – to him it “seems too structured for a genuine diary, and its language doesn’t quite ring true” (CA: 64), which echoes the reservations expressed about Robinson Crusoe by a

106 The structure of my discussion in this second part of Chapter 4 departs from the format followed in Part 2 of each of the previous two chapters. In so doing, I seek to reflect the way in which, in Cloud Atlas more obviously so than in the first two novels, a reader’s attempts to view each fragment of the five book-end stories as a whole is frustrated by both structural and temporal interference. It is precisely this failure that ensures the retention of each fragment’s singular character, while also evading what Sarah Dillon sees as attempts to construe the novel as “a totalling vision of architectural wholeness” (2004: 14). 150 number of its first readers (Seidel 2011: 168-9). However, while the aim to interrogate the idea of primariness is by no means redundant, the correspondence upon which it rests here is too obviously manufactured. Mitchell’s novel now seems to be pointing to, and playing on, the habit of readers to take their cue from what has gone before, where they in all likelihood overlook the fact that such facile readings amount to what Derrida says, as referenced above, is an “invention of the same by which the other turns back into the same” (2002: 69). Consequently, to see Frobisher’s story as only repeating the themes of absence found in its precursor – even if they still are in force – would be to ignore its singularity, and its particular function in constantly revitalising the literary archive. Therefore we are moved to resist the pull of the law – the one that demands that our reading stays within previously established parameters – and turn to those traces that are at odds with the ones encountered in the previous fragment(s); that is, those that work at restoring, though always by necessity unsuccessfully,107 some sense of presence. One such trace is found in “Letters from Zedelghem”, when Frobisher’s sceptical appraisal of Ewing’s journal resembles, ironically, the initial assessment of the epistolary novel at its inception in the 18th century, that the “letters that made up the epistolary corpus pretended to be a real life product and proposed models of reading that are based on the illusion of reality and authenticity, on the conformity with the aesthetics of verisimilitude” (Ştefan 2009: 73–my italics). In this way, Frobisher’s misgivings about the legitimacy of the journalistic form are conferred onto the epistolary one he himself employs; this fact, rather than eliding the difference between the two forms, serves to distinguish the one from the other, each as a singular event within the larger framework of literature.108 Such particularization goes on to highlight both the authenticity (as literary forms) and the fictionality (in relation to actual events) of the two modes of writing, a move that simultaneously also annuls the law that requires them to be either real or fictional. This implies that the archive which Cloud Atlas attempts to bring into being here is not concerned with reality, or even with accounts of reality (which, one might argue, is the aspirational design of the literary archive), but with reality as itself an

107 It is only through failing to commit to a definitive presence that the archive continues to exist. 108 Despite the monolithic qualities usually assigned to the concept of ‘literature’, in this novel we are repeatedly reminded that every act of literature is a singular event, causing literature itself to maintain its singularity from one text to the next (and the previous). 151 ongoing account, constantly fed by an untold number of differing accounts of itself. As such, the predacity that forms the theme of Ewing’s view of the colonialist project changes face in Frobisher’s letters, in his references to the atrocities of WW1, to centre on the nationalist aspect of humanity’s predaciousness, described by the jewel merchant Dhont (CA: 462): ‘Another war is always coming, Robert. They are never properly extinguished. What sparks wars? 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. […] Our will to power, our science, and those v. faculties that elevated us from apes, to savages, to modern man, are the same faculties that’ll snuff out Homo sapiens before this century is out!

Where in Ewing’s writings the motivation for colonialist rapine lies in the desire for a “sweet dominion” that is sanctioned by “divine grace” (508), here the moving force behind nationalist predacity is the human “will to power” that is sanctioned by the state (462), and that, as in Ewing’s story, will lead to the extinction of the race. Moreover, the “casual brutality” (31) mentioned by Ewing in his journal escalates in Frobisher’s story to a worldwide violence that is an “instrument” – a weapon, one could say – in the service of the will to power. The fearful apprehension of humanity’s end is further emphasised in Frobisher’s letters, where they describe Vyvyan Ayrs’s dream of a “nightmarish café, brilliantly lit, but underground, with no way out. [Ayrs had] been dead a long, long time. The food was soap, the only drink was cups of lather” (CA: 80). This dream prefigures (or in the structure of the novel as a whole, remembers) Sonmi ̴ 451’s story in the fifth story, of a politico-corporate depredation even more widespread and profound than that of the nation state, a corruption that was already put in place by the criminal collusion of state and corporations depicted in the account of Luisa Rey’s experiences in part three. Then, in part four, Timothy Cavendish’s memoir also alludes to (remembers) Sonmi when he describes the server at the old-age home as a “sexless automaton” (CA: 183), as well as to the “Soap” in Sonmi’s story when he repeats the phrase from the science fiction film Soylent Green,109 that “Soylent Green is people!” (CA: 179). These scraps, along with many others, steadily

109 As explained in the first part of this chapter, Soylent Green is a food made from human flesh, in the same way that the Soap ingested by fabricants and consumers is made from the flesh of fabricants. 152 accrete to form the impression that what is being preserved in this novel’s archival design is the extinction of humanity by its own voraciousness, a sense of human beings consuming themselves in each one’s relentless bid for superiority over the other. Perversely, then, archiving is in itself a self-consuming endeavour when all it can ultimately commemorate is the absence –in the past, the present, and the future– of the human artefact that is its raison d’être. This conundrum seems to form the gist of nuclear engineer Isaac Sachs’s lengthy deliberation on truth and time (408-9):  Exposition: the workings of the actual past + the virtual past may be illustrated by an event well known to collective history such as the sinking of the Titanic. The disaster as it actually occurred descends into obscurity as its eyewitnesses die off, documents perish + the wreck of the ship dissolves in its Atlantic grave. Yet a virtual sinking of the Titanic, created from reworked memories, papers, hearsay, fiction – in short, belief – grows ever ‘truer’. 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.  The present pressed the virtual past into its own service, to lend credence to its mythologies + legitimacy to the imposition of will. Power seek + is the right to ‘landscape’ the virtual past.  Symmetry demands an actual + virtual future, too. We imagine how next week, next year or 2225 will shape up – a virtual future, constructed by wishes, prophecies + daydreams. This virtual future may influence the actual future, as in a self-fulfilling prophecy, but the actual future will eclipse our virtual one as sure as tomorrow eclipses today. Like Utopia, the actual future + the actual past exist only in the hazy distance, where they are no good to anyone.  Q: Is there a meaningful distinction between one simulacrum of smoke, mirrors + shadows – the actual past – form another such simulacrum – the actual future?

Sachs is voicing, almost verbatim, Derrida’s conceptualization of time (1998: 118), where the latter differentiates between the framework that assumes an unproblematic linear relation between past, present, and future, and one which understands the temporal scheme as the ongoing retrospective operation in which an immemorial past can only ever be retrieved in a future-to-come that always remains inaccessible, for now. In these terms, as Sachs points out, the sinking of the Titanic did not actually happen (much in the same way that Jean Baudrillard (1995) demonstrates that the Gulf War did not actually happen) because the event was/is/will be only ever made up of “reworked memories” that are in all likelihood

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“fraudulent”.110 The “mythologies” that Sachs refers to are akin to those which are preserved in an archive that arises, and keeps arising anew, from the human will to power; importantly, only those who seize power are entitled to decide which myths will be maintained. Such an archive is thus in itself a myth, for both the powers that determine its design, and the disenfranchised masses who have no say in the matter. Consequently, argues Sachs, the actual past (the immemorial past) and the actual future (the future-to-come) are useless Utopian constructs; he pessimistically describes them, again in Baudrillardian terms, as hollow copies of the real thing, however perfect, so that there can be no “meaningful distinction” between past and future. This implies that the progressive flow of time is abrogated – as is the case in the narrative structure of the novel as a whole, of course – and time itself is revealed to be yet one more construct in the enterprise of the literary archive. In other words, we get the sense that Cloud Atlas, rather than depicting an archival project that preserves the rich history of humankind, and with it a prolific literary tradition, seems to be demonstrating that a project of this (Utopian) nature can only preserve the end of history in a future that has already been written. (The title of the novel itself hints at such aporia when, for example, Timothy Cavendish is prepared to give everything “for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable […] To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds” (389); a similar sentiment is reflected in Zachry’s thought (318) that “[souls] cross the skies o’ time, Abbess’d say, like clouds crossin’ skies o’ the world”). Sachs’s exposition is in large part an articulation of the novel’s, and perhaps also the author’s, never-ending grappling with the pessimism that threatens, over and over, to overwhelm human endeavours. As much as the text seems prone to despair, however, writing a future that has already happened, traces of the way in which it is writing against itself – writing to defer that fruitless prospect – grow gradually more insistent. The earliest of such traces had already been found when Ewing’s journal, as pointed out in the first part of this chapter, writes against the canon established by works such as Robinson Crusoe, which at that time in Mitchell’s novel seems an act of redemption that would open the way for similar counteractions that, in turn, would redress humanity’s wrongdoings. However, the

110 In Derrida’s understanding of the immemorial past, even the eyewitnesses who are ‘present’ at an event cannot precisely remember what happened, in every detail. Moreover, every witness will have a different account, as each individual’s focus perforce digresses from another’s. To cap it all, the ‘truth’ of any memory is forever caught up in the constructs of the language used to articulate that memory. 154 text resists such a facile resolution when it becomes clear that the liberating action of this counter-writing is of the same sort as Ewing’s rescuing Autua, one resting on the liberators’ unawareness of their own complicity in establishing, in the first place, the conditions that enable dominion. Consequently, it would seem, discourses of dissent are steadily integrated into the canon (considering, for example, the current canonical status of Heart of Darkness), an act of naturalization that apparently annuls the redemptive possibilities of literature. Nevertheless, the trajectory of counter-writing, while diverted, continues, suggesting that, as Derrida puts it, “the future itself has a future” (in Katz 2005: 88). This much is evident when Frobisher’s mode of writing, as illustrated earlier, ironically sets itself up for the same disdain that he himself heaps on Ewing’s journal; it then develops further in the title of the next story: “Half-lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery” (my italics). This title – which attracts in its turn the scorn of editor Timothy Cavendish in the next fragment, as a “lousy name for a work of fiction” (CA: 158) – suggests a definite recourse to an originary story, or to an exemplary mode of writing (insofar as it follows almost by rote the conventional design of a typical title for the novelistic thriller). However, it does so knowingly, with every intention of discrediting the idea of some ideal generic framework to call to notice the formulaic devices that make it seem ideal, as is evident when Rufus Sixsmith tells Luisa that “all thrillers would wither without contrivance” (CA: 95). In fact, this story makes no bones about its being a fictional account: we learn from Cavendish’s memoirs that Luisa’s story springs from the imagination of one “Hilary V. Rush” (403),111 with no indication of whether it is based on fact – something which becomes a moot point, in any case, in view of the novel’s ever-increasing obfuscation of the need for such a qualification.112 The self-reflexivity displayed in the third fragment in turn stresses the seemingly failed bid at verisimilitude of the two that preceded it, a failure that becomes ever more pronounced in the stories that follow, to lay bare all of their efforts at erasing the evidence of their own contrivances. In fact, in Cavendish’s

111 In another temporal contortion, and keeping in mind that Luisa Rey appears as a writer in ghostwritten some years after the events recorded here, but before this account was written, one could wonder whether this may be a pseudonym, which repeals my point that this third fragment is entirely fictional, but perhaps confirms the thought that a story need not commit to being either factual or fictional. 112 The contrivances in Cloud Atlas are also brought to light, in particular where it emphasises the recurrence of a comet-shaped birthmark (discussed in part one of this chapter) only for this sign to dwindle and die. 155 memoirs the attempts at effacement seem to be of the type that hide in plain sight: for instance, Cavendish, calling himself “an experienced editor”, disapproves of “backflashes, foreshadowings and tricksy devices” (152) – a view that, no doubt intentionally, and amusingly, is dismissive of Cloud Atlas, for one – and believes that “reading too many novels makes you go blind” (379).113 Of course, Cavendish’s account is itself riddled with “tricksy devices”, the bid to gain trust through playing at plain-speaking disapprobation being one of them. Rather than discrediting reading, therefore, this fragment draws attention to the contrivances that, as noted by Sixsmith, make of it such a joy. More important, however, is what this fragment preserves in the context of its forerunners (and later, in what is to come): in the figure of Cavendish the editor we find another allusion to acts of literature, and to their role in the formation of the literary archive through selection and displacement. Significantly, Cavendish’s critique of writing and reading aims to naturalize this exclusionary practice – to erase its injustice, in Derrida’s words – but the middle-class pretensions of his own writing neutralizes this erasure to constantly reinstate, but each time in a different state, traces of the bias it strives to deny. The endless vacillation between effacement and reinstatement – what we could perhaps see as endless re-writings and re-readings – is intricately linked to violence. As Derrida observes, discourse (that is, all manner of reading and writing and speech) “can only do itself violence, can only negate itself in order to affirm itself, make war upon the war that institutes it, without ever being able to reappropriate this negativity, to the extent that it is discourse” (in Katz 2005: 139). It could be that the violence weaving through a text stems from such self-directed conflict, and that the negativity, or pessimism, which plagues Mitchell’s novel is repeatedly brought about by new circumstances, new acts of aggression that reiterate an ancient will to power. Sonmi ̴ 451 (CA: 360-1) explains this process to Archivist: In the beginning there is ignorance. Ignorance engenders fear, Fear engenders hatred, and hatred engenders violence. Violence breeds further violence until the

113 It is an open question whether Cavendish is aware of the double entendre in this comment, where it hints at another solitary activity that can “make you go blind”. In any event, the parallel that may or may not be drawn opens interesting avenues for discussion on reading, particularly in view of Roland Barthes’s description of the jouissance of reading, by which he means “enjoyment in the sense of enjoyment of a right, of a pleasure, and, most of all, of sexual climax” (Young, 2000: 32). 156

only law is whatever is willed by the most powerful […] the creation, subjugation and tidy xtermination of a vast tribe of duped slaves.

However, the pessimism expressed here, while it cannot be reappropriated, can be held at bay until a future-to-come through the text “shift[ing] ground”, as Roland Barthes suggests, “to abjure what [it has] written […] when gregarious power uses and subjugates it” (1977, in Sontag 2000: 467-8). So, if the first fragment of Cloud Atlas (re)opens the discourse of predacity, interrogating it as the basis of colonialist practice, the second goes on to shun the cursoriness with which certain power structures subsume this issue in the archive. The fragments of the second story then turn to the ways in which the will to power materialises as nationalist rapaciousness, then as rank materialism in corporate-run state institutions in the third story, and so forth, in each subsequent piece. Moreover, with each iteration the appetite inherent in such rapaciousness is more strongly emphasised, in itself becoming the artefact that is preserved in this archival endeavour. Consequently, the apparently sidelong references to food in Cavendish’s memoir in the fourth fragment – starting with “Soylent Green is people” (179), moving to “a tepid lamb chop” that “outstared” him (183) and a “mashed banana [that] clagged [his] throat” (371) – depict, by means that rely heavily on the intertextual, an existence where that which nourishes humanity starts gaining an independent life, one that is increasingly, uncannily, menacing to the body that it feeds. Moreover, the cannibalistic elements found in Ewing’s story, naturalized114 in the archive as an essential characteristic of the other, turns in on the self – and on the body social – to manifest, in Sonmi’s story in the fifth fragment, as a form of self-cannibalism that culminates in humanity’s “Fall”. In the words of Meronym the prescient, reported by Zachry, “human hunger birthed the Civ’lize, but human hunger killed it too” (287). The ceaseless re-writing and re-reading of the same and the similar- seeming accounts of an insatiable reality serve to repeatedly invoke what Derrida considers to be, in Hillis Miller’s reading (2002: 70), the “multiplicity of voices [that] forbids or forecloses the temptation to think of the other, the wholly other, as some Platonic “One.”” The wholly other is, as John Caputo explains, “every singularity,”

114 Such naturalization is also evident in the way that the title of Dermot Hoggins’s memoirs, Knuckle Sandwich, emphasises the violence metaphorically associated with that image while hiding in its folds literal, and unthinkable, connotations of cannibalism. 157 each of “whose alterity should be respected, not assimilated to the same, not subsumed under the universal” (1997: 52). In the case of Mitchell’s novel, this “One” – the One to disregard the alterity of the singular – is, perhaps not surprisingly, the Archive. This much is evident from Sonmi’s story being recorded by the representative, nameless, Archivist, who cannot justify why “a corpocratic state outlaws any historical discourse [including film]” while it chooses to “preserve archives […] whose very xistence is a state secret” (CA: 243). It is also to be seen in Zachry’s description, in the sixth story, of the make-up of the “Icon’ry”: “Our icons, what we carved’n’polished’n’wrote words on durin’ our lifes, was stored there after we died” (255), where the tribe’s “god” Sonmi is known to answer their prayers. It is here where the intertextual and uncanny characteristics of the archive are most palpable. In the face of Meronym’s, and possibly also a reader’s, scepticism about divine intervention, when Zachry and the Prescient are fleeing the Koona, he is wary about safely crossing the bridge that seems to offer escape, a presentiment which proves to be well founded in that their pursuers are annihilated when that bridge unaccountably collapses. Eerily, this scenario recalls the incident in ghostwritten, where Bat Segundo convinces Zookeeper to spare humanity on the strength of the story in The Bridge of San Luis Rey. As much as the text, and a reader, is then tempted to naturalize such a convenient concordance of events, the very contrivance of such coincidence forces us to acknowledge the contrivance of our naturalizing it. In other words, we have to grant that that the intertextual and uncanny characteristics of this narrative, and of the archival project represented here, are forced upon us, but – perversely – consensually, because we are (so that we are) disposed to resist our thinking of this archive as the Archive. Having perhaps, at the end of the novel that is also only the beginning of the story, abjured the Archive, we may even allow ourselves to reimagine the place of the archive as an event in time, in the first place, and at any time, rather than as a specific space and time (what Derrida (1995: 10) describes as “domiciliation [or] house arrest”). As Derrida also points out, “[the] discursive forms we have available to us, the resources in terms of objectivizing archivation, are so much poorer than what happens (or fails to happen, whence the excesses of hyper-totalization)” (in Attridge 1992: 35). We see this when Zachry retrieves his massacred family’s archival objects as “proof the Bailey’s Dwellin’ kin’d ever existed” (CA: 315), only for his children to discard most of them when they “sivvied his gear” after he died 158

(324); the one item to have any meaning for them is Sonmi’s orison, but it is a meaning completely untethered from the awe it inspired in Zachry. In other words, the Archive cannot (re)presents the lived experience of the objects that it preserves; the closest archival representation of lived experience is found, as Zachry intimates, in storytelling, in “mem’ryin’n’yarnin” about the singular events in people’s lives so that it seems “like if they lived in words they cudn’t die in body” (317). Mitchell’s novel works to demonstrate exactly that: like the cloud atlas it comes to resemble – one which can identify cloud formations without ever being able to provide an exact weather forecast – the singular events that it commemorates are presented in a combination that relies on specific universal forms, but that refuses to predict the future. Thus the singular event that continues to dismantle the Archive and rebuild the archive, I would argue, is reading, including writing and storytelling as forms of reading; the other singular event that repeatedly revises the archive is ‘the’ reader, who also happens to be a different reader in and of herself, every single time. Eventually then, in a future that has already been written but whose eventuality is endlessly deferred to a future-to-come, we have to concur with Sonmi that “[no] matter how many of us you kill, you will never kill your successor” (365). So in the end, or what seems to be the end, despite every attempt to bring the story of Self and Other to a close, there is always, uncannily caught between an immemorial past and a future-to-come, that invitation from Zachry’s son (325):

Sit down a beat or two. * Hold out your hands. * Look.

159

Chapter 5 Conclusion

To recognize one's own in the alien, to become at home in it, is the basic movement of spirit, whose being consists only in returning to itself from what is other. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method

160

Readers and reading, in theory

At the close of this thesis, one cannot but accept the invitation from Zachry’s offspring (CA: 325) to “look” (back, and to the future). The purpose of this study, then, was to work towards clarifying – with reference to selected novels by British author David Mitchell and their exemplification of the vagaries of reading – the character of ‘the’ reader, and her place in the ever-changing landscape of literature and its interpretation(s). In conceiving of this project, I used the term ‘ghostreading’ to describe the spectrality of reading processes, insofar as they constantly hesitate between past experiences and future expectations. My endeavour involved readings of what I ventured to refer to as Mitchell’s ‘inaugural’ trio of novels – ghostwritten, number9dream, and Cloud Atlas – which aimed to establish how the uncanny, intertextuality, and singularity work in each novel, respectively, to allow for the emergence of a spectral reader. To this end I introduced, in Chapter 1, several viewpoints regarding the subject of, and in, theories of reading and interpretation. Using Wolfgang Iser’s phenomenological approach (1974: 279-283) as a starting point, I argued that a reader’s “imaging” of the text necessarily includes her imaging of herself as the reader. Iser’s description of the “gestalt” of a text therefore also allows for reference to the gestalt of a reader. Since imaging is largely a personal concern that keeps shifting its appearance, ‘the’ reader becomes a nebulous entity – a ghostreader, so to speak – the indeterminacy of which paves the way for thinkers such as Roland Barthes (1986 [1971]: 58-9) to interrogate claims to an cohesive self, and demonstrate that a reading subject will always comprise innumerable, interlinked, textual and contextual references. The identity of this composite subject now becomes the site of conflict between what Michel Foucault (1983: 212) sees as self-rule (the drive for autonomy, or, perhaps more accurately, for what Jacques Derrida (1992: 67-8) describes as singularity) and subjugation (the systemic subsumption of the self by its own and others’ notions of its identity). Jean Baudrillard (1998: 170) sees this tug-of-war to result in a “perpetual recycling” of the subject, a process through which the subject per se is, according to Jonathan Culler (1975: 28), “dissolved”, becoming the conduit for multifunctional interpersonal systems. The dissolution of a subject’s particularity does not do away with its singularity, though: on the contrary, it is a process that offers an individual the 161 choice of assuming other identities that are fleetingly unique, while yet retaining its own momentary distinctive character. Each recycling therefore presents an original entity, an iteration of selves that bears (and bares) the (always incomplete) traces of whatever a subject was, or used to be, together with whatever it will be, and/or may become. In other words, each new appearance of a subject is also an original moment that preserves all of its other manifestations, therefore in a sense commemorating the past, with a view to the future. In this we see the actions of the trace following the design of the archive, which in turn suggests that the identity formation of a subject is an archival enterprise through which past and present portions of the self accumulate so as to project, albeit inadequately for now, its future self, or selves. As regards the subject constituted in reading and interpretation, then – the one who at first seems to be primarily a reading subject, but in time proves to encapsulate fragments of both writing and narrating (in the same way that a writing and a narrating subject comprise instances of each other’s actions, and of reading) – I contend that its singular identity is similarly composed of ongoing archival activities that are both intertextual and uncanny. This ceaseless structuration of a composite subject subsequently allows for the claim that the reader is herself an archive – the archive, in fact – which preserves the relics of previous readers and readings (including herself and her readings) in service of future readers and readings. Brava! In retrospect, it would seem that the framework outlined above ironically both leads to and results from my project consistently working against itself from the very outset, much like the archival enterprise that it ultimately describes, and unconsciously ended up emulating. In other words, it now becomes evident that, as much as I attempted to show how Mitchell’s ‘first’ three novels lay the groundwork for his “über-novel” (Huff Post Books, 9 June 2015), the narrative characteristics of these ‘originary’ texts continually resist their definition as such, while paradoxically also asserting their singular character. In other words, this study constantly had to counter the inclination to subsume the singular identity of each reader into a self- same whole, even while it sought to find a place for ‘the’ reader that would allow for, as Valentine Cunningham suggests, “the presence, the rights, the needs of the human subject” (2002: 143) as well as the uniqueness of each reading. This incessant resistance to a facile naturalization of the subject is aided by the structure and narrative perspective of these three works, and is what allows a 162 multifaceted reader to emerge. In the process, we find a multipart entity who encourages the construal of these texts, if not all texts, as being strange-born successors of writings and readers – of Mitchell’s works as well as those of other writers – yet to come. At this point, I find myself compelled to devise an alternative, less ungainly term for this eternally-novel reader, in the same way that Barthes speaks of ‘scriptors’ and ‘co-scriptors’ instead of ‘writers’ and ‘readers’. Here I am guided by Mitchell’s reference to an über-novel, opting for the term “über-reader”, not in the pop-culture sense of “uber” as superior or transcendental, but with an understanding of the German “über” meaning ‘above’ as well as ‘across’. In addition hereto, the term also makes room ‘above’ and ‘across’ gendered pronouns, allowing me to speak of this reader as ‘it’ without dehumanizing him or her because, as Barthes observes, “literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost” (1977: 2). Such an impersonal designation is possibly also a natural corollary of the tendency, as I observe in footnote 17 of Chapter 2 Part 2, to re-articulate a first- person narrator as third-person object when narrativizing any subject’s story. All of this being said, however, such a designation, like any other, will always fall short of a proper definition of the figure that it attempts to describe, and will need to stand as placeholder for the Beckettean opportunity to, as mentioned in Chapter 2, “fail better”. The contours of an über-reader and its reading are not immediately discernible, starting to take shape only in the progressive interpretation of Mitchell’s three debut novels. As discussed in Chapter 2, the uncanny warping of time and space in which this reader hesitantly appears is first obliquely perceived in ghostwritten, where the equivocal structure of a nine-in-ten-parts plot serves to highlight the uncanny nature of narrative. In this novel, all but one of the nine individual stories that make up the text are presented as seemingly disparate first- person narratives, where each protagonist-narrator is repeatedly and surreptitiously displaced – palimpsestically scored through, in a sense (perhaps prefiguring the palimpsestuous intertextuality found in number9dream). In consequence, the specific identity of the narrating ‘I’ remains deeply ambiguous, well into the third episode of the book. Even thereafter, the sense of discomfiture resulting from the subject’s incessant obliteration never quite subsides, as each 163 protagonist-narrator makes in its turn a cameo appearance in the narrative of another, even as this other’s voice bears the haunting echoes of those that precede it, as well as those that follow. Thus we see a perpetual recycling of the narrating self, who is also an experiencing self, a process that extends to the reading self, who is herself experiencing the reading, as well as the narration. Such a polygonal recycling means that each reader of a story is expelled, along with its protagonist-narrator, to make room for another reader (who, intriguingly, may be the same person as before), signalling an endless iteration of the subject, manifestations that must always be predicated on the spectrality of the self, and vice versa. In this continual exchange, the preservation of the spectral reader constitutes what Robin Lydenberg sees as a “self-doubling” that amounts to a “dramatization of the uncanniness of writing and reading” (1997: 1082). No less uncanny, I found, is how in the process of self-doubling, writer and reader are embodied – written into being as one being – in the ever-changing body of a protagonist-narrator who is forever also the site of the disembodiment of all three. Towards the end of this study, it becomes apparent that it is in this strangely inchoate shape that we may get an inkling of the existence of an über-reader. With this uncanny situation in mind, I went on to demonstrate that such a composite figure defies any attempt to identify, explicitly, an entity named ‘the’ reader. Instead, the narrative structure of ghostwritten offers a collection of individual stories that interact in startling ways to simultaneously assemble an undiscernible number of readers, each one with a story of her own that keeps on changing. Moreover, we gradually come to realize that all the stories in the novel centre, in one way or another, on an apocalyptic event – the collision of the earth with an incoming meteor – that never comes to pass in the book, but that (because it) is always, and always will have to be, deflected by the episodic dislodgement of narrators and readers. In this way, the looming destruction of humanity becomes a metaphor for the immanent death of the subject, which is precluded only by a perpetual recycling of stories (that are in themselves subjects of sorts), according to what Lydenberg sees as the “generative power” that springs from “the uncanniness of narrative” (1997: 1073). A key aspect of this uncanniness is the recurrent phoenix-like rebirth of a composite literary subject in the telling and re- telling – the writing and re-writing, the reading and re-reading – of stories. In the end, then, after (each) (re)reading (of) ghostwritten, and a reader (time after time) 164 being propelled back – parallel to the experience of the noncorpum in the text – to where the first story began, it is evident that this narrative is not chiefly about the identity of the subject, whatever its form. Unexpectedly, its deeper concern would seem to be with the ineluctable homelessness of the self, which in turn translates into the uncanny transience of writing-narrating-reading subjects. On contemplating this thesis as a whole, it now appears that such transience is a prerequisite for the structuration of an über-reader in its wandering above and across the stories being told, without its ever settling on any one. As I subsequently sought to demonstrate in Chapter 3 of this study, the sense of the uncanny persists in number9dream, this time as both the result and the cause of the highly convoluted processes of intertextuality indicated by the title of the novel. These operations come to the fore most clearly in the nine-part structuration of the novel as a bildungsroman, a novel of formation centring on the protagonist-narrator’s search for the father he never knew which, in contravention of generic tradition, continually works to dispel the illusion of an integrated self. The palimpsestic qualities of intertextuality in particular function to trace the fragmentary evolution of the protagonist-narrator’s self-knowledge and -identity (attributes which Jens Zimmermann (2004: 495) sees as comprising “the humanist idea [that is] the purpose of literary theory”). Moreover, the fact that the final chapter of the novel is left blank – creating an eight-in-nine-parts story that mimics, though (possibly on purpose) imperfectly, the structure of the first novel – emphasises that, contrary to conventional perceptions of the genre, self-identity involves the realization that the experiencing self will never be able to coincide with the narrating self. This means that the mature subject which ostensibly is foreseen in the act of narrating is forever yet to materialize, ever only a shadowy manifestation of itself. In this way the uncanny self-doubling identified in ghostwritten is now, in number9dream, more obviously the result of intertextual links between various incongruous – past, present, and future – manifestations of the self, so to illustrate, perhaps, Derrida’s words in his last interview given to Le Monde (August 19, 2004): "Je suis en guerre contre moi-même". The battle between a subject’s selves – its continual struggle to express a self-same through the very gesture that defeats such expression – is also reflected in this second novel, in the prevaricating realities offered by its protagonist- narrator, Eiji Miyake. Eiji’s search for his father centres on a subjective perspective 165 that wavers between a series of surreal scenarios, where certain bizarre fantasies comprise his projected reality, while other real events baffle even his wildest imaginings. Such a cognitive ambivalence results in the subject’s identity growing increasingly indeterminate, to the extent that Eiji starts to resemble a virtual character, much like the virtual father he repeatedly encounters. Then, in an almost imperceptible transition, a reader is implicated in the simulation of the subject, she herself becoming a spasmodically simulated subject when Eiji is presented as a reader of texts whose meanings constantly elude him (in the same way that the first moment he had encountered his father had passed him by). In effect, Eiji’s entire quest is rendered meaningless, at least as far as conventional expectations are concerned, confirmed by his realization that the father he found was not the father that he had always wanted. Reading, it is therefore drastically suggested, becomes meaningless as soon as a reader has decided what it (the text, reading) means; in a way, she would never want a novel to mean what she had thought it would, because that would dull the pleasure of reading and lead, radically, to the death of reading and readers. This much is evident when the final chapter of the book, the one whose blank pages have nothing left to say yet contain everything still to be said, serves, in passing, repeatedly to overwrite – alten überschreiben – this novel of development, and with it the identity of the (narrating/experiencing, experiencing/reading) subject. These blank pages effectively describe the death of ‘the’ reading subject, but as prerequisite to the birth of many readers, both apart and as one. In looking back, I can now say that this vacant space is the only one in which an über-reader may be found, in that it is the only place where all possibilities of literary activity can be imagined over and across discoursal contexts. Following these observations, I presented a reading of Cloud Atlas in Chapter 4 that relies primarily on Derrida’s description of the archive, and the a priori spectrality of its structure (1995: 54), in order to demonstrate the impossibility of concretizing the past. I argued that the fragmented composition of the novel mimics the archival enterprise of collecting and preserving historical relics in commemoration of an institutionalized version of the past. Moreover, the spacio- temporal dispersal of the novel’s six stories serve to evoke the uncanny and intertextual characteristics of reading detected in the first two books, as well as to reinforce the crucial singularity of every reading and every text. Implicit in this is the 166 perception of reading as an archival project, and of a reader as the collector of discoursal remnants scattered over time and across space – an über-reader, as it eventually transpires, who is in itself an archive, perhaps the only one to fulfil the proper task of archiving, which is to preserve never-ending change. These efforts on the part of the über-reader go on to break the highhanded hold of the Archive and the gestures through which it attempts to gloss over its fragmented nature. The palindromic configuration of Cloud Atlas encourages this reader to constantly resist such naturalization so as to debunk the inherently exclusionary nature of the archival drive. In other words, each fragment of the novel uses a different generic form to invoke a particular piece of Western history in order gradually to dismantle the authority through which a dominant version of the past is upheld. The book’s next move is to show how its undoing of a prevailing narrative runs the risk of itself attempting to claim supremacy. So while the first fragment of the novel offers a denunciation of colonialist voracity, the deferred outcome in its second instalment reveals the inevitable inadequacy of such critique in the face of humanity’s unrelenting will to power. The result is that the second fragment, which apparently condemns how cursorily the power structures of the Archive dismiss the remorseless colonization of the other, its concluding piece confirms that the insatiable appetite of colonialism endures under the disingenuous banner of nationalism, then in the rampant materialism of corporate-run state institutions, and so forth, in each successive fragment. Every iteration contributes to the assemblage of an archive that preserves, not humanity’s noble causes or even the critiques that uncover their mercenary drive, but their repeated erasure. It now becomes apparent that this palimpsestuous process delineates a recurrent resistance to totalizing stories, prompting the über-reader to maintain an archive that assembles a Levinasian humanism of the “other”, an act of hospitality which Zimmerman describes as “an ethical obligation imposed by the irreducible dignity of one's neighbor” (2004: 502). Upon reflection, my account of the narrative concerns of Cloud Atlas suggests, inadvertently at the time, that the vacant space left at the close of number9dream likewise offers – as is also anticipated in that novel’s fifth chapter – a temporary hospitality to the roving über-reader. A parallel space then opens up in the middle of the book, where this reader, before being called onward in its search for a home, is allowed briefly to rest by the fire while Zachry tells his story. We now 167 realize that such was also the case in ghostwritten, where the text’s continual resistance to closure persistently encourages the reading of texts over and across every text and every reading. The über-reader thus seems to be driven by an incessant homesickness, what Derrida calls “archive fever” (1995: 57), which allows it to offer, in turn, an interim haven for countless transient others. (Homesickness, I would argue, is differentiated from nostalgia and its baggage of anxiety in that the latter’s naïve belief in a pristine past precludes any possibility of the home it longs for ever being reached, while the former’s ceaseless quest always offers the prospect of a homecoming, deferred, but only for now.) Interestingly, each of the seven novels in Mitchell’s embryonic über-novel similarly opens up a temporary home for the über-reader, embodied, as I have indicated at several points in previous chapters, in the recycling of characters and narrators between all of these books. The über-reader is familiar with the figures it encounters: nevertheless, the hospitality it experiences in the various books is constantly suspended uncertainly on the threshold of arriving and/or departing, much as the Latin root of the word, hospes, hesitates between meaning ‘host’, ‘guest’, and/or ‘stranger’ – loosely, perhaps: writer, reader; and/or neither, and/or both. Such a liminal position serves to confirm this reader’s homeless state, steadily intensifying its unassuageable homesickness. Homesickness, I now recognise, is also what has been driving this study. It is evident at this stage that my description of the uncanny in ghostwritten was, and always would have been, insufficient in identifying the reader of that text. In other words, my argument regarding the uncanny character of the reader could account for the impact of the intertextual and the singular only by absenting their functions from this novel, deferring them to another time and place even while being unable to repress the traces of their influence. The same is true, though with different prominences, for my discussion of the other two novels. I had to de-emphasise the way in which intertextuality in number9dream, when presenting a composite reader, engages the uncanny at the same time as it gives rise to uncanniness, all while highlighting the singularity of each intertextual reference, the text, and a reader herself. Likewise, in my reading of Cloud Atlas, I am obliged to overlook the effects of the uncanny and intertextual features of a composite reader when I attempt to show that the singularity of the seemingly self-same – that is, the uniqueness of each novel and each reader – is constantly interrogated in the very 168 gesture through which it is maintained. In short, the main points of my argument are repeatedly overthrown, banished from the home they seek to settle in so that my quest for the identity of ‘the’ reader – much like Eiji’s quest for a father – always leads to another strange, yet vaguely familiar reader, and my search has to continue. Consequently, I would argue, any theory of readers and reading that I – and perhaps any other person – may attempt to formulate will need to acknowledge itself as being eternally exiled from the body, human or ideological, it seeks to inhabit. In light of the above, I propose that homesickness serves to engender the overwhelming number of theories concerned with the reading and writing of literary texts, which make up the corpus of Literary Theory. Hence my study, in its turn, offers a theoretical framework that attempts to account for the identity of ‘the’ reader of literature by making use, in the main, of thoughts associated with the poststructuralist tenets arising from postmodern views. However, these ideas have largely fallen out of favour in recent times, mostly because, as Zimmermann notes, their “desire to liberate [reading] from the predictable, a desire for constant renewal and unexpected interpretations […] has clearly exhausted this potential” (2004: 495). An increasing number of scholars of literary theory are proclaiming the death of postmodernism, and are “united in their desire to recover some kind of humanism” (496) in their deliberations. Nevertheless, as Zimmerman rightly remarks, “[we] cannot simply return to traditional liberal or Christian humanism; however much we desire such a homecoming, none of its recent advocates provides an ontological justification for this move” (503). Indeed, he “wonders whether comfort is not the unconscious desire of many commentators on the future of theory after postmodernism”, leaving them liable to “being dismissed as sheer, unfounded nostalgia” (498). Zimmermann proceeds to present a conveniently comprehensive synopsis of contributors to “the future-of-theory debate” (498). He includes the views of scholars such as Graham Good, Terry Eagleton, Jean-Michel Rabaté, and Hans Georg Gadamer, but most pertinent to my discussion are those of Valentine Cunningham. Calling for a resumption of humanistic reading practices, Cunningham writes against the ham-fisted implementation of Derridean deconstruction, what he calls “Theory”. For Cunningham, says Zimmermann, Theory has its use in articulating “the function of literature as a shaper of the 169 realities we perceive”, but snookers itself in “its self-contradictory and self- destructive tendencies” (497). Moreover, “the un-deconstructable trinity of author, text, and reader that governs all human communication” constantly restrains Theory’s attempts to undermine fundamental truths (ibid). Cunningham envisages “a model of sacramental reading” (505), which occasions "a scene of complex, whole-person ethical instruction, deeply rooted in rationality but particularly in emotionality", informed by the realization that "literature is about human behaviour and preoccupied with questions of how to live […] This is reading, hermeneutic, epistemology, beyond aporia" (Cunningham, in Zimmermann 2004: 498). One cannot help but feel, with Zimmermann, that Cunningham’s model of reading, for all its delicate deconstruction of Theory’s claims, may suffer from idealism, even nostalgia, and that this ahistorical yearning for a liberal or Christian humanism that we reconstruct in our fondest memories, is not helpful and may in fact become dangerous. After all, one major problem with nostalgia is its blindness to political-social realities and its romanticizing of the past. If theory has done anything, it has left us with a deep suspicion of systems based on trust in human ability (499).

That is to say, there is still a place for postmodernism’s defamed hermeneutics of suspicion in our ongoing efforts to perfect (always imperfectly, for now) our understanding of reading and readers, one that continually presents a renewed appreciation for humanness. Moreover, rather than indicating an irresolvable impasse, our endless search is precisely what extends hospitality to every singular permutation of Theory, however brief may be its stay. In any conceptualization of theory, Zimmermann recommends balance, that “ancient humanist virtue” which offers hospitality to “a neo-humanism [that] can grow in the interdisciplinary climate that postmodern cultural theory has established” (499). I trust that I have been faithful in observing such a balance when proposing the existence of the über-reader, particularly when Cunningham’s “undeconstructable trinity of of author, text, and reader” (505) can be deconstructed to allow for an integrated trio of writer-narrator-reader that is always open to deconstruction. As for David Mitchell’s über-novel, it continues to grow, even while readers await his ninth book, and his eighth book awaits his readers-to-come. For now, we über-readers continue roaming over and across his existing works, and all the stories they contain through intertextual writing and storytelling and reading, which are all the stories that the literary imagination can engender. For now, we share the 170 older Mo Muntervary’s feeling (BC: 595) of being “erased […], fading away into an invisible [self]. For one voyage to begin, another voyage must come to an end, sort of”.

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