Palter & Prescience – On David Mitchell and Ghostwritten Sean Hooks SubStance, Volume 44, Number 1, 2015 (Issue 136), pp. 39-54 (Article) Published by University of Wisconsin Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2015.0005 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/577271 Access provided by University of Washington @ Seattle (2 Jun 2017 19:24 GMT) Sean Hooks CLICK HERE TO ACCESS THE ENTIRE D AV I D MITCHELL SPECIAL ISSUE Palter & Prescience – On David Mitchell and Ghostwritten Sean Hooks The works of David Mitchell have inspired a consistent utilization of the lexicon of accolade, at times even of hyperbole. Reviews and criti- cal assessments are littered with terminology such as: visionary, protean, prolific, genre-bending jack-of-all-trades. He is, for some, the ultimate conceptual writer, a 21st Century Man. His work, until recently, was called unfilmable, and depending on your opinion of the Tykwer-Wachowski adaptation of Cloud Atlas, maybe you think it ought to have stayed that way. Maybe you’re a Mitchell fan who likes to tout the British maestro’s mash-ups of genre fiction and formalist literary mischief as redefining the novel, as mind-blowing, intuitive, challenging, pyrotechnic, ambitious, and clever. But one man’s clever is another woman’s gimmick, phrased as such because Mitchell’s books are populated by androgynes and float- ing consciousnesses, by liminal pubescents and dislodged expatriates, even by non-gendered (ungendered? genderless?) characters, phantasms and poltergeists, child ghosts and tribal gods and other undefinable sorts of immortal sentience. One who tends to write in the category of High Gamesmanship, David Mitchell is a cineaste audiophile lit-hound blender. Widely praised and well reviewed but also bestseller material, he is not a fringe member of some experimental fiction cabal, nor cogno- scenti fodder, nor a soi-disant enfant terrible. As much as his supporters might want to argue for his indie cred, he’s been blurbed by Dave Eggers and the movie version of his big novel starred Tom Hanks. Mitchell is inarguably intelligent, seemingly sincere, even humble, despite aiming so high, aspiring to gargantuan meritorious blocks of impressiveness, an individual whose writing is highbrow and referential but who also possesses an affable accessibility. If Mitchell’s books are difficult they’re recognizably so, ‘fun difficult’ as opposed to ‘avant-garde difficult’ (for the latter, think Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, published the same year as Mitchell’s debut), and reading his first novel,Ghostwritten , fifteen years after its publication, what abides is its prescience. By presenting a Huxleyan dystopo-present freckled with brand names and macular with rampant consumerism – Mitchell would later dub the dystopo-future a ‘corpocracy’ in Cloud Atlas (in which Prescients become a race) – the globetrotting Englishman’s first book has been proven © Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2015 SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 39 40 Sean Hooks right about so many of its most pressing concerns. This is a novel with plenty of maximalist complexities and ‘big ideas’ – from a thread about transmigration to grapplings with the body-soul separation to allusions regaling you with erudition and aplomb on everything from Star Wars to The Master and Margarita, from Salman Rushdie to the history of jazz, from science fiction to cosmological and genetic facts – but his opening salvo is actually a much more straightforward one: he was a young novelist disappointed by the confounding inauthenticity of the modern world. Mitchell’s quasi-autobiographical Black Swan Green was nominated by Slate’s Jessica Roake to replace The Catcher in the Rye as the coming- of-age novel of choice for the millennial generation and beyond (Roake). This is mostly because Salinger’s mid-20th century classic is viewed by some as didactic and privileged and other things that grad students and hipsters like to decry, but a Caulfieldian disdain for phonies is absolutely at the forefront of Mitchell’s debut as he weaves his Bridge of San Luis Rey-style causality brocade, a litany of disport rhetorically railing against the fake, the unreal, anything that’s less than capital ‘T’ True. Thornton Wilder’s novel is the source of this one’s epigraph and there’s also a central character in Ghostwritten known only as “the zookeeper,” called Zooey for short, Mitchell quite aware of J.D. Salinger’s oeuvre and legacy as well. Like the youngest and most put-upon member of the Glass family and his author, Mitchell yearns for integrity. He also aches to believe in an upside to the vexations of interconnectedness and privacy depredation that exist in a globalized real world and a post-DeLilloan fictive one (one of the few negative-leaning reviews of Ghostwritten upon initial publication came from Laura Miller in Salon who labelled it “bubble-gum DeLillo” [Miller]). And for all of Mitchell’s grandiose maximalism and intricate intertextuality, his love of the baroque and the byzantine, the hotchpotch of proper nouns and allusions, one of his most era-appropriate U.S. analogs is the minimalist socio-aesthetician Chuck Palahniuk, whose Fight Club rose to stratospheric levels of prominence after David Fincher’s movie version came out in 1999, the same year as Ghostwritten. Both authors, one in England and one in the U.S., via completely different approaches, pretty much saw it all headed the same way. The endings of both novels are eerily similar in their nihilistic glee, in the near-certainty of looming apocalypse. Their methods and pedigrees are dissimilar, but they clearly depict a world going to hell (as Ghostwritten’s follow-up, Number9dream, makes even more plain in a direct allusion to Dante’s Inferno and its nine circles of perdition). The penultimate chapter of Ghostwritten virtually predicts recent NSA outrages and the current administration’s backpedals and excuse- driven politicking, along with all the related subtopics of note surrounding SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 Sean Hooks On David Mitchell and Ghostwritten 41 cyber-crime, or cyber-populism, depending on one’s opinion of Julian Assange, Bradley/Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Anonymous and a variety of other ultra-modern entities. Mitchell predicting such conflicts a decade-and-a-half ahead of time is striking. This chapter – essentially the conclusion, since what follows, a section entitled ‘Underground,’ is more of an epilogue or coda – is the only portion of the novel not in first person and it operates as a series of blurbs, dispatches and excerpts from the Bat Segundo Radio show (Edward Champion subsequently took Mitchell’s character and literalized it). This terrestrial pre-digital form works as forerunner to the internet, much like 1989s Pump Up The Vol- ume – the subject of a great A.V. Club piece on films from “The New Cult Canon” – and this conclusion bookends the overture, as in the opening section our camera-eye non-protagonist literally calls himself a harbinger. He’s initially quite likeable and opposed to all the right things but he turns out to be a terrorist, an Okinawan Tyler Durden. “Okinawa” is the title and setting of that first segment, and from there begins a great westward progression through ten chapters (though ‘sections’ or ‘movements’ may be more apropos), each named after a place. Mitchell has spoken in interviews, such as his Paris Review “Art of Fiction,” about his anthropological instincts, his novels as a form of cartography informed by a desire to invert traditional West-to-East expan- sionism, whether motivated by a repudiation of Occidentalism or perhaps just post-colonial U.K. guilt. That second-to-last chapter, the crescendo/ denouement, is called “Night Train,” and here the place-name being a non- sedentary one both reflects the itinerant quality of the preceding pages and evokes Howard Zinn’s epigram, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.” Kinesis is a repeated Mitchell meme, as is interrogating the abrogation of personal responsibility. By the time we get to “Mongolia” (the chapter nar- rated by an incorporeal ‘spirit’ – think David Bowie and Amanda Palmer simultaneously voicing Ariel from The Tempest), the westward migration is underway and we detour through Russia and continental Europe and the United Kingdom before finally landing in the States. Near the end of the book a different kind of spirit, a high-line hacker or perhaps a rogue fleck of artificial intelligence, hijacks a military satellite for a westerly sojourn of its own. This character, the aforementioned zookeeper, a form of AI as overseer, a beneficent HAL, is also gender neutral, and brags that he/she/it is, above all, not a fabulator. It even has four governing directives, reminiscent of Asimov’s Laws of Robotics. Zookeeper tells The Truth, and does so as a disembodied voice, ringing up Bat Segundo’s radio program (which serves as a sort of analog-era 4Chan, Daily Kos or Oc- cupy bulletin board) as the world narrowly avoids self-destruction. This call-in show, despite being the receptacle for Zookeeper’s near-biblical SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 SubStance #136, Vol. 44, no. 1, 2015 42 Sean Hooks missives, is not exactly highbrow colloquy but instead a haven for Talk Radio-era Eric Bogosian/Oliver Stone (or Alex Jones by way of Richard Linklater) conspiracy theory, a repository of late night neurotics and in- finite loneliness. Mitchell is not afraid to portray the blow-up-the-system point of view and its marginalized adherents sympathetically, as in a cri de coeur against debt where “Default!” is issued as a call to arms.