David Mitchell's Post-Secular World

Buddhism, Belief and the Urgency of Compassion

Rose Harris-Birtill

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350078611
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire moderne

Since the publication of Ghostwritten (1999), David Mitchell has rapidly established himself as one of the most inventive and important British novelists of the 21st century. In this landmark study, Rose Harris-Birtill reveals the extent to which Mitchell has created an interconnected fictional world across the full run of his writing. Covering Mitchell's complete fictions, from bestselling novels such as Cloud Atlas (2004), The Bone Clocks (2014) and number9dream (2001), to his short stories and his libretti for the operas Sunken Garden and Wake, this book examines how Buddhist influences inform the ethical worldview that permeates his writing. Using a comparative theoretical model drawn from the Tibetan mandala to map Mitchell's fictional world, Harris-Birtill positions Mitchell as central to a new generation of post-secular writers who re-examine the vital role of belief in galvanizing action amidst contemporary ecological, political and humanitarian crises. David Mitchell's Post-Secular World features two substantial new interviews with the author, a chronology of his fictions and a selected bibliography of important critical writings on his work.

1

Enter the ‘World-Machine’: Navigating David Mitchell’s Narrative Islands

In David Mitchell’s libretto for Sunken Garden, the final words are spoken by Simon Vines, a character who goes missing following the trauma of his daughter’s cot death and becomes trapped in the supernatural garden of the opera’s title. The garden lures in the depressed and suicidal, where they remain numbed from the pain of personal trauma. Having chosen to live with his grief, Simon finally escapes and returns to his friends in the real world, where he embarks on a parachute jump. As the audience see the vast projected film footage of Simon’s first-person view of the earth from above, he describes the experience:

you’re falling, falling, falling, and you see the fields and towns and roads and rivers and factories and hospitals and all … Laid out, below, and you think, Look at this, look at this … massive, unjust, beautiful, cruel, miraculous … World-Machine. Look at it. And you think, ‘I’m a part of this’. (9)

The opera begins and ends with film footage from the parachute jump, but it is only in the libretto’s final moments that the footage is explained as Simon’s view of the earth during his skydive. In a typically Mitchellian narrative strategy, this projected landscape which frames Sunken Garden’s tale encourages the audience to interpret the aerial map – and subsequently the entire performance – as depicting the inner workings of a self-contained ‘World-Machine’ in action.

This cartographic approach to storytelling as world creation – in which the narrative is presented as a fictional landscape, a ‘machine’ whose inner workings are vitally interconnected – is visible in Mitchell’s novels, which function both as parts of a single macronovel with shared characters and tropes, but also as microcosmic worlds-within-worlds. The wider ‘World-Machine’ of his macronovel features a profusion of global geographies and narrative voices, as is clearly visible in Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas, but also in the temporal breadth and immersive supernatural world creation of The Bone Clocks and Slade House, and even in the geographically and temporally localized micro-universes of Black Swan Green, number9dream and The Thousand Autumns. For example, alongside Black Swan Green’s profusion of contemporary references to the music, politics and ‘teenspeak’ of 1980s Middle England, the novel’s creation of a self-contained world is embedded in its characters’ names and identities. In a 2006 interview by Edward Champion, the author notes of this coming-of-age novel:

[a]lmost all of the names are taken from Ordnance Survey map 150, which is the originally government-programmed map of the UK […] 150 is the area of Worcestershire and a bit of Gloucestershire and a bit of Herefordshire around where the book is set. So almost all of the kids – people’s – names in Black Swan Green are names that I found off that map. (‘David Mitchell II’)

This act of double mapping – using pre-existing place names for fictional characters – embeds the novel’s setting into its characterization, emphasizing the importance of locality in personal identity formation, but also, conversely, the cumulative importance of individual identity in the creation of such shared localities. By using this technique, Mitchell portrays the geographical as simultaneously anonymous and intimately personal, bringing a ‘government-programmed map’ to life via the fledging generation that inhabits it – and, in doing so, reclaiming and animating its territories from the perspective of its imagined inhabitants.

This sense of cartographic play is visible even in Mitchell’s earliest approaches to storytelling, as mentioned in the introduction. However, this project to create a microscopically detailed fictional world has become a defining feature of his adult writing. In a 2010 interview by Wyatt Mason, Mitchell notes that the aim of his macronovel is to map an entire world as extensively as possible:

I can’t bear living in this huge beautiful world […] and not try to imitate it as best I can. That’s the desire and the drive […] to try to duplicate it on as huge a scale as I can possibly do. (‘David Mitchell, the Experimentalist’)

The author’s use of ‘as huge a scale’ as the limits of fiction will allow, spanning novels, short stories and libretti, remains largely unaddressed in Mitchellian literary criticism to date. Yet the challenge of mapping Mitchell’s textual universe as an interconnected terrain is narratologically irresistible: as Shawn Ballard notes of Ghostwritten’s ambitious narrative scale in ‘Complex Systems and Global Catastrophe: Networks in David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten’ (2011), ‘one simply has to map it’ (11).

When approaching his narratives as a whole, several critics refer to Mitchell’s oeuvre as a mappable terrain, while simultaneously noting its intangible – and therefore seemingly ‘unmappable’ – metaphysical dimensions. For example, Kathryn Schulz notes of the author:

he is a pangaeic writer, a supercontinental writer. What is for geologists a physical fact – that the world is everywhere interconnected, bound together in a cycle of faulting and folding, rifting and drifting, erosion and uplift – is, for Mitchell, a metaphysical conviction. (‘Boundaries Are Conventions’, 2014)

In ‘The Novels in Nine Parts’ (2011), Peter Childs and James Green also describe an expansive geological textuality underpinned by a similarly ‘metaphysical’ force, noting that ‘an ethics of fiction’ underpins the author’s ‘multidimensional terrain of transmigratory dreamscapes’ (44). Caroline Edwards also notes in ‘“Strange Transactions”: Utopia, Transmigration and Time in Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas’ (2011) that Mitchell’s works move ‘towards a revised version of humanism as it is being played out through the spatially- and temporally-disjunct coordinates of unevenly expanding globalization’, combining the ethical metaphysics of humanism with the pre-mapped coordinates of a globalized world (179). Similarly, William Stephenson’s ‘“Moonlight bright as a UFO abduction”: Science Fiction, Present-Future Alienation and Cognitive Mapping’ (2011) notes Mitchell’s ‘new and exhilarating form of cognitive cartography’, combining the geographical with the psychological (240).

While each of these critics describes Mitchell’s writing in terms of its expansive narrative geographies, they also simultaneously refer to these works as replete with seemingly unmappable forces that push his fiction beyond any conventional notion of textual landscape. In each case, descriptions of Mitchell’s works as cartographically navigable – a ‘pangaeic’, ‘supercontinental’ textual ‘terrain’, with ‘spatial […] coordinates’ that evidence a larger textual ‘cartography’ – are accompanied by a fundamentally metaphysical dimension. These non-geographical forces are variously described as ‘multidimensional […] transmigratory dreamscapes’, creating their own ‘ethics of fiction’ and ‘revised version of humanism’. This is an unconventional narrative terrain built on ‘spatially- and temporally-disjunct coordinates’, forming a metaphysical world whose cartographic approach is ‘cognitive’, rather than strictly physical. Any literary study attempting to visualize Mitchell’s works as a cartographic whole must therefore find a critical methodology capable of mapping both its expansive narrative geographies and their intangible yet deeply interrelated metaphysical and ethical dimensions.

While nearly all published Mitchellian literary criticism to date focuses on the author’s novels, as discussed in the introduction, this chapter maps the breadth of this textual ‘World-Machine’ from an alternative perspective, focusing on the author’s short stories. Discussing twenty-six of these short fictions, it asks how – and why – these narrative units operate as both self-contained islands and archipelagically linked texts, and what their significance is in light of the larger project of the macronovel. Approaching his short stories as linked narrative islands, this chapter argues that these make essential contributions that would otherwise remain absent from Mitchell’s novels alone, while remaining continuous with the approaches of his longer works. As the dominant categories shared by these stories demonstrate, Mitchell’s textual universe eschews the conventions of traditionally linear narrative, or even the cartographic conventions of a two-dimensional approach to genre and theme as separate narrative axes. Instead, the author’s short stories effectively blur the boundaries between genre and theme, their shared preoccupations exploring the components of faith from a secular perspective. In doing so, Mitchell’s short stories reflect an important post-secular dimension of his writing by cumulatively interrogating the building blocks of belief, moving beyond the Lyotardian postmodern breakdown of grand narratives in order to reimagine the secular value of their individual components in galvanizing positive humanitarian action. As this chapter argues, standard conceptions of mapping are unable to account for these metaphysical, non-linear dimensions of Mitchell’s fictional world. But the Tibetan Buddhist mandala, read as a belief-centred map of a precisely structured and ethically engaged world, offers an alternative approach that can help to illuminate the world-building strategies behind Mitchell’s post-secular fictions.

Mapping the metaphysical

To take up the challenge of mapping Mitchell’s works – or in fact any terrain – is to create a form of representation that is entirely removed from the original. This unavoidable fictionality of cartographic representation renders the act of mapping a process by which the cartographer’s decisions – including the medium, area of inclusion, method of visualization, perspective and scale – will always reflect its creator’s biases and assumptions as much as the area being mapped. To this end, this book foregrounds its own methodology for approaching the author’s works as a form of mapping; its mandalic approach is not a transparent theoretical ‘lens’, but a separate critical entity whose application unavoidably changes our understanding of this textual terrain. This study therefore aims to deliberately expose the cartographic assumptions involved in its own form of map-making, employing a map of an immaterial, belief-dependent world to chart the boundaries of a fictional one.

What shared properties might this structure bring to a comparative analysis of Mitchell’s textual world? The author has already indicated in interview that the scale for a map of his works must be vaster than any physical map is able to imagine; as a cosmogram, the mandala is a diagram of a universe, its area of inclusion as large as its participant’s capabilities of visualization. As Schulz, Childs and Green, Edwards, and Stephenson highlight, any Mitchellian map must be simultaneously able to represent the multidimensional, metaphysical, ethical and global; the Tibetan Buddhist mandala is merely the visible map used to guide a metaphysical visualization, its distinct ethical purpose making it a fitting tool for approaching the Buddhist influences within Mitchell’s works.

Mitchell’s fictional ‘World-Machine’ also shares the mandala’s meta-spatial approach in its creation of a post-secular world whose dimensions are both geographical and ethical. Discussing the mandala’s early historical uses as a ‘mental model of social reality’, Robert A. F. Thurman notes in ‘Mandala: the architecture of enlightenment’ (1997) that ‘there is already a clear sense of mandala as world-model’, noting its use in royal rituals as a representation of a global structure that links both the sacred and the secular (130). Susan M. Walcott also argues in ‘Mapping from a Different Direction: Mandala as Sacred Spatial Visualization’ (2006) that the mandala is a ‘multidimensional’ and ‘metaphysical’ map whose ‘mental terrain’ broadens the assumed limits of geographic representation, a ‘cognitive graphic of sacred space’ that can valuably ‘expand […] assumptions of cartographic portrayal, space, and contestation’ (71–9). Mapping their own profusion of interconnected global localities, Mitchell’s fictions similarly foreground the ‘contestation’ of such spaces through his exploration of human power dynamics and conflicts over vast geographical and temporal scales.

The mandala also offers its own form of macrocosmic ‘World-Machine’ in the giant edifice of Borobudur, a Buddhist monument in Indonesia which covers over 100 square metres. Ken Taylor describes Borobudur as ‘a Buddhist mandala representation’ in which ‘the mandala form of the monument is repeated in the wider landscape’ (‘Cultural Landscape as Open Air Museum’ 53–4). Just as Borobudur renders the mandala into a huge physical terrain, Simon’s evocation of a ‘World-Machine’ leaves the audience with a final visual image of his entire world from above. Simon realizes he is a mere ‘part’ of the ‘massive’ terrain that he sees, its contrasting facets forming a single world that is simultaneously ‘unjust, beautiful, cruel, miraculous’. As if looking down on a two-dimensional mandala, Simon’s top-down view of the landscape brings a realization of his world as an integrated system – and a realization of his wider role within it.

These distinct ‘World-Machine[s]’ – Simon’s world, the wider macronovel and the mandala – all share a form of machine-like structural organization that makes thes e complex worlds into self-contained world-systems. How might the theoretical concept of the world-system, then, relate to these World-Machines? In ‘The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System’ (1974), Immanuel Wallerstein develops a structural framework for a world-systems theory in which ‘the only kind of social system is a world-system’ based on labour and production (390). While Wallerstein’s theory predominantly deals with economics, its structure also provides a transferrable blueprint; he argues that there are ‘three structural positions in a world economy – core, periphery and semi-periphery’, forming an interlinked system that can only function as a whole (391). Read outside of its economic origins, the circularity of this structure offers a useful transferrable model for imagining an interdependent fictional world-system, its structural framework replicated within the mandala’s fundamental structural points of centre, outer boundary and cardinal points, as will be discussed in Chapter 4.

Employing a similarly circular structural model for literary criticism, Charu Sheel Singh notes in Concentric Imagination: Mandala Literary Theory (1994) that ‘[t]he concept of the whole can best be represented by the circle and literary theory cannot dispense with it’ (81). It is worth briefly noting that the circular model is not necessarily the ‘best’ or most appropriate concept for the whole in every instance; for example, applied across global economics, the core-periphery model used by Wallerstein’s world-systems theory risks reinscribing problematic assumptions of Western hierarchical dominance. However, applied specifically for mapping shared outcomes, the circular world-system of the mandala provides a useful comparative model for approaching a body of interconnected narratives as a continuous fictional universe. Rather than mapping assumptions of geopolitical dominance, it allows for a transferrable focus on the unavoidably shared ethical consequences of individual actions, thereby offering an alternative world model based not on global capitalism, but on the lived experiences that impact the shared fate of Homo sapiens as a co-dependent and now globally interconnected species.

Like the macronovel, the mandala presents a structural world-system that is replete with divisions, as well as connections. In ‘Missing Mandalas: Development and Theoretical Gaps’ (2004), Rosita Dellios recognizes that the mandala’s circularity and cardinal points map a ‘one-world scenario’ based on both ‘divisions’ and ‘connections’, its structural model emphasizing ‘an awareness of the value of difference for the wellbeing of the whole’, and the importance of the ‘balance of global forces, between North-South, East-West, high-tech/low-tech, agrarian-urban, tribal-postmodern’ (10–13). However, this is no simple world-system; as Jung A. Huh notes in ‘Mandala as Telematic Design’ (2010), mandalas contain ‘innumerable multidimensional worlds’ whose ‘boundaries overlap’ and ‘co-exist’, providing a model that preserves, rather than homogenizes, complexity and difference (23).

Giuseppe Tucci also notes in The Theory and Practice of the Mandala (2001) that the mandala ‘is a geometric projection of the world reduced to an essential pattern’ (25). To take a mandalic approach to Mitchell’s ‘World-Machine’ is to view all of his fictions – including his short stories – as integral to this larger ‘geometric projection of the world’, a world in which a form of ‘essential pattern’ is incessantly at work. As a form of visual scripture which maps philosophical, rather than physical, spaces, the mandala – when itself ‘read’ as a map – allows for the spatial conceptualization of relationships between the shared themes and ethical approaches of Mitchell’s universe,...