Genre Beside Itself: David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks, Pulp Intrusions, and the Cosmic Historians’ War

Abstract

ABSTRACTPerhaps nowhere in David Mitchell’s oeuvre does the collision of genre hierarchies take so radical a turn as in his novel The Bone Clocks (2014), where pulp fictional imagery, themes, and style invade such moments of high seriousness as Iraq war journalism and global environmental collapse. This essay argues that Mitchell’s book channels the painfully ecstatic throes of a narrative literally “beside itself” with theorizing, shaping, and embodying: both of new generic form and of a self-reflexive discourse on theory. The cosmic war between “atemporal,” memory-redacting “Anchorites,” and “Horologists” that ruptures the storylines of Mitchell’s novel becomes a way of reexamining the place of meta- and master narratives in the age of their postmodern exile. It also allegorizes a war between theorists, between contesting ways of thinking history, memory, and the archive, yielding important implications for Mitchell’s trans-textual “Über-Book” and for the novel as a temporal form.