David Mitchell

Contemporary Critical Perspectives

Wendy Knepper, Courtney Hopf

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781350215412
• eBook ISBN: 9781474262118
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

David Mitchell is one of the most critically acclaimed authors in contemporary global writing. Novels such as Ghostwritten, Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks demonstrate the author's dazzling literary technique in an oeuvre that crosses genres, genders and borders, moving effortlessly through time and space. David Mitchell: Contemporary Critical Perspectives brings together leading scholars of contemporary fiction to guide readers through the full range of the author's writings, including discussions of all of his novels to-date plus his shorter fictions, essays and libretti. As well as offering extended coverage of Mitchell's most popular work, Cloud Atlas, the authors explore Mitchell's genre-hopping techniques, world-making aesthetics, and engagements with key contemporary issues such as globalization, empire, the environment, disability, trauma and technology. In addition, this book includes an expansive interview with David Mitchell as well as a guide to further reading to help students and readers alike explore the works of this tremendously inventive writer.

1

Globalization in David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten: Minding ‘the reality gap’

Hugh Charles O’Connell

Chapter summary

This chapter draws on Marxist perspectives and world-systems theory to offer a fresh critical reading of the representation of globalization in David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten: A Novel in 9 Parts. The analysis pays close attention to the various reality gaps that structure this narrative, beginning with the fact that the novel subverts its own titular claims by incorporating a supplemental tenth section, entitled ‘Underground’. Elsewhere the novel foregrounds tensions and contradictions within the capitalist world-system by calling attention to the problematic relationship between the narrative whole and its parts, such as through the interplay of genres within a single work or its thematic emphasis on struggles to position the self in the global order. Altogether, Mitchell’s Ghostwritten maps and renders perceptible the totalizing dimensions of late capitalism, and in so doing, the novel fulfils a utopian function by rendering globalizing processes open to critique.

Introduction

Ghostwritten: A Novel in 9 Parts is comprised of nine discrete, first-person narratives, set in nine different locations that move from the East to the West (Okinawa, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Holy Mountain in China, Mongolia, St. Petersburg, London, Clear Island and New York). Each section has its own distinctive first-person narrator and generic influences, such that the novel comes to mediate the ghost story, techno-thriller, science fiction, romance story (with a ‘meet cute’ scenario) and heist narrative. Consequently, it takes the addition of a narratively excluded tenth part, ‘Underground’, to act as a supplemental coda that brings the themes and locations of the nine proper chapters into relation with one another. Taken together, the novel’s form and content foreground the difficulties of mapping a globalized world, particularly through its thematic emphasis on subjects struggling to understand their own position. Drawing on the work of Fredric Jameson and world-systems theory, this chapter offers a new critical perspective on the structures and themes of Ghostwritten, a novel that maps globalization and interrogates its inner workings. In this chapter, I argue that the novel’s fragmented narrative structure replicates the totalizing expansiveness of globalization as well as its decentred and disjunctive aspects. Ghostwritten presents an innovative formal solution to the crises of the individual’s unknowable location within the shifting matrix of global late capitalism, even as it critiques globalization as a totalizing economic force.

Global novel form: Totality, cognitive mapping and utopianism

Positioning Ghostwritten as a critique of globalization is not new. Caroline Edwards (2011), Nicholas Dunlop (2011) and William Stephenson (2011) have argued for the oppositional political possibilities that emerge through Ghostwritten’s mobilization of genre conventions to produce striking critiques of late capitalism. However, despite these important interventions, most analyses of Ghostwritten all too hastily reject any notion of totality, whether at the formal level, as a heuristic, or as the systemic nature of capitalism. Instead, critics often provide an objective description of the decentralizing factors of globalization alongside its more positive corollary: the development of a cosmopolitan subjectivity that arises in the transition from the national to the global. Yet, as Steven Shaviro reminds us, globalization has not so much produced cosmopolitical agency, as it has furthered ‘the “real subsumption” of all relations of production and consumption … of life under capital’ (2012: 384). Not just labour, but all aspects of everyday life, from leisure to education, are brought under the sway of ‘financial speculation, which extracts “value” from them at every turn’ (2012: 384). Thus, rather than producing new historical agencies that can challenge the systemic nature of globalization, the production of systemically subjugated individuals is inextricable from late capitalism itself.

What is required, then, is a shift in emphasis away from the individual as the subject of history and towards the totality of the world-system of global capitalism. As David Cunningham argues, the novel of capitalist modernity is best understood ‘not as an epic of the bourgeois “people”, but as a displaced account of “the system of capitalism itself”’ (2010: 14). If ‘the novel is the epic form of a world which “has become infinitely large”, … then surely the “form-problem” of such unending richness will be constituted … by the impossible “totality” of capital itself’ (18). It is in this light that I want to restore ‘totality’ to the conversation about Ghostwritten by turning to the relationship between globalization, subjective experience and cognitive mapping. Given the abstract nature and diffuse structure of the capitalist world-system, not to mention its global scale, its representation poses what Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle call an ‘aesthetic problem’, since ‘capitalism as a totality is devoid of an easily grasped command-and-control centre’ (2015: 24). Imagining and representing the post-fordist conditions of globalization becomes like trying to represent the internet: portals, nodes and pathways appear and disappear, seemingly at random, rendering its operations as paradoxically ubiquitous and invisible. The aesthetic problem, then, lies in finding ‘ways of making the invisible visible’ (2015: 25). This imperative to register the invisible traces of late capitalism in the form of the cultural text is what Fredric Jameson labels cognitive mapping.

Ghostwritten’s cognitive mapping of globalization eschews the postmodern novel’s characteristic decentring of the narrative/protagonist/reader. Instead, it employs a narrative structure that involves the discrete plots of its foundational nine chapters, suggesting that the specificity and the centeredness of closed fictional forms is central to its aesthetic. However, each chapter includes minute coincidental remainders, a certain surplus contingency whereby characters’ actions leap the bounds of their own narratives and obliquely link up with others. Reflecting on this tendency, Mitchell identifies his style as the ‘compounded short story’ (qtd. in Dillon 2011: 4) and goes on to argue that ‘short stories have a background noise that creates the illusion that the world is much bigger than the mere 10 or 15 pages, and I wanted to see if I could sync up the white noise of the background of short stories’ (5). It’s this emphasis on the ‘background noise’ that makes Mitchell’s novel stand out; while each story has its own contained, subjectively and spatially organized narrative, this ‘sync up’ of the background noise of the larger world is an apt metaphor for cognitive mapping, for registering the imprint of the capitalist world-system in the form of the artwork.

Significantly, cognitive mapping is predicated on a recognition of its own provisional and belated abstractness: ‘The project of cognitive mapping obviously stands or falls with the conception of some (unrepresentable, imaginary) global social totality that was to have been mapped’ (Jameson 1988: 356). There is an affinity here between the background noise of Mitchell’s novel and Jameson’s ‘unrepresentable, imaginary global social totality’ insomuch as both register an impossible possibility, which in Ghostwritten’s case, is captured by the inclusion of an extratextual tenth part. In other words, the novel’s utopian vocation is to raise the illegible system of connection to a brief legibility, whereby narrative chance is recast as a formal system, thus rendering the novel an impossible totality. This argument resonates with Robert Tally’s assertion that the utopian impulse today aligns with cognitive mapping as a ‘method by which one can attempt to apprehend the system itself … [such that] Utopia is an attempt to construct or project a totality’ (2013: ix). The utopian dream of Ghostwritten, then, is to expose what Mitchell refers to as the immaterial ‘white noise’ that connects the disparate locations, plots and protagonists across the novel’s westward trajectory and thus to transform this indiscernible ‘noise’ into discernible ‘sound’.

However, as Jameson explains, successful cognitive mapping is not necessarily grounded in ‘revolutionary’ victory, but ‘may be equally inscribed in a narrative of defeat’ that ‘causes the whole architectonic of postmodern global space to rise up in ghostly profile behind itself, as some ultimate dialectical barrier or invisible limit’ (1992: 415). And it is in this latter sense that Ghostwritten becomes both a novel about and of globalization, simultaneously charting the reduction of the subject against the expanse of the global system, while also affirming the necessity and specificity of difference at the cultural, political and spatial levels and invoking the absent present system that unites those differences in the totality of global late capitalism. It’s a herculean task that can only end in failure. And, indeed, Ghostwritten fails to produce the capitalist world-system within its formal composition as ‘a novel in nine parts’. What makes it an especially original novel of globalization, then, is its narrative failure to do so. Instead of narrative resolution, it must proffer an extra-formal mediation of the aporias of the global system through the addition of a supplemental tenth part. Consequently, the visible rendering of that very ghostly trace that global capitalism has left upon the novel’s form can only be achieved through the excessive, supplemental tenth chapter of this ‘novel in nine parts’.

The failure and belatedness of this project within the nine main narratives is registered by many characters’ emphasis on and recourse to conspiracy, which is indelibly linked to the subjective desire to master systemic narratives. ‘Conspiracy’, Jameson attests, ‘is the poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age; it is the degraded figure of the total logic of late capital, a desperate attempt to represent the latter’s system, whose failure is marked by its slippage into sheer theme and content’ (1988: 356). In what follows, I will examine how Ghostwritten explores the problem of the constitutive ‘reality gap’ (Mitchell 1999: 257)¹ that forms between subjects and the capitalist world-system as seen through the novel’s series of weak, paranoid conspiratorial narratives (those that reduce the complexity of globalization to a spurious and paranoid subjective mastery) and strong systemic conspiratorial narratives (those that eclipse subjective perspective in favour of revealing systemic conditions). While the former contain their mediation of globalization’s totalizing violence within images of pseudo-utopian closure in the family, the latter promise immanent, perpetual and total annihilation. To reveal the irresolvable, structural oppositions of this dialectic between the subjective and the systemic and the problem of their false resolution in either pseudo-utopian escapism or anti-utopian annihilation, I’ll turn to the novel’s tenth part. Here the novel reveals the unifying spectre of the global capitalist system itself as simultaneously arriving too early and too late.

Weak conspiracy: The role of Quasar and the noncorpum

Conspiracy enters Ghostwritten as a negative aesthetic development, a false means of resolving the narrative reality gaps between subjectivity and global world-system through paranoia and illusion. While the majority of Ghostwritten’s nine parts are not conspiracy narratives in the traditional sense, they represent the way that conspiracy has transcended its generic borders to become a cultural dominant, where globalization’s penetration of the remotest corners of the world and the psyche feel like conspiracy in their unfathomable state. Thus, one of the central aspects of Mitchell’s novel concerns the domestication of conspiracy in the global narrative itself. This can be seen immediately in the opening chapter, ‘Okinawa’, which narrates the escape of ‘Quasar, the harbinger’ (5) from Tokyo to Naha following his involvement in the Subway Sarin Incident. ‘Okinawa’ notably foregrounds the relationship between paranoia, conspiracy and the violent desire to reconcile the global system with the individual’s phenomenological and epistemological experience of the reality gap by eradicating the distinction between subject and system.

The opening description of Naha, one of Okinawa’s oldest commercial ports, combines aspects of globalization, conspiracy theory and sci-fi elements in a grand paranoid mélange. Air conditioning is kept off as it ‘impairs alpha waves’, and curtains closed because ‘you never know whose telephoto lens might be looking in’ (4). Moving from the description of his room to the surrounding landscape, Quasar notes elements of modern urban development (factories, department stores, fridges, etc.) that, coupled with the control mechanisms of telecommunications infrastructure and environmental blight, amount to a conspiracy of global proportions in which Japan colludes in its own demise. At heart, it is an alienated existence that leads to Quasar’s dismissal of ‘their cities’, in which the genitive ‘their’ could equally be said to refer to the ‘unclean’ Japanese as well as to the American forces that conspire against the integrity of the nation (4).

Against this dark backdrop of a thoroughly degraded Japan, Quasar’s cult promises a transcendental negation through an occult nationalism that intermixes quasi-sci-fi trappings, including telekinesis, telepathy and astral projection, with a counter-totalizing vision. In this, it neatly reproduces within a Japanese context what Emily Apter refers to as the paranoid, totalizing subjectivity of ‘oneworldedness’. Rather than cognitive mapping, which seeks to raise the system that structures individual experience, ‘oneworldedness … envisages the planet as an extension of paranoid subjectivity vulnerable to persecutory fantasy, catastrophism and monomania, … [and produces] a delusional model of subjective recognition that apprehends itself in global schemata’ (2006: 366, 371). It’s an operation that, in Ghostwritten, recursively individualizes the totalizing violence of globalization’s real processes of subsumption by placing the cult’s spurious sci-fi elements in opposition to existing technoscientific regimes that are the driving force behind the totalizing aspects of globalization. Thus, Quasar believes the individualization of these quasi-transcendental sci-fi powers that reproduce the penetrating immediacy of systemic globalization will vanquish the purveyors of economic globalization, which he envisions as: ‘The Americans from the military bases, … [the] Okinawan males [that] ape the foreigners, … [and the] businessmen, buying and selling what wasn’t th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Series editors’ preface
• List of contributors
• Chronology of David Mitchell’s life
• David Mitchell: An introduction
• 1 Globalization in David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten: Minding ‘the reality gap’
• 2 Questing for the post-postmodern: David Mitchell’s number9dream
• 3 ‘What was knowledge for, I would ask myself’: Science, technology and pharmakon in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas
• 4 Witnessing transhistorical trauma in Cloud Atlas
• 5 Raids on the inarticulate: The stammering narrative of Black Swan Green
• 6 History, globalization and the human subject in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
• 7 Voicing tragedy in David Mitchell’s libretti: Wake and Sunken Garden
• 8 David Mitchell’s representations of environmental crisis and ecological apocalypse
• 9 The Bone Clocks and the mud of humanity: The Anthropocene Bildungsroman
• 10 David Mitchell as world-builder: The Bone Clocks and Slade House
• Creating a fictional universe: An interview with David Mitchell
• Further reading
• Index
• Copyright