Abstract
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 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). 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).
Ph.D. (English)