Schrödinger’s Cat Metalepsis and the Political Unwriting of the Postmodern Apocalypse in David Mitchell’s Recent Works

Abstract

In the beginning, David Mitchell’s early postmodern fictions staged the impossibility of rendering the End. In each of his first three novels, Mitchell creates eschatological narratives that lack the moment of destruction: Ghostwritten points elliptically to the coming comet that an artificial intelligence, Zookeeper, will allow to destroy the earth; number9dream ends in a chapter that literally lacks letters, leaving a stark blank page after a quasi-apocalyptic earthquake hits Tokyo; and Cloud Atlas frames the event of the apocalypse without ever depicting what actually caused the deadlanding of most of the planet and the obliteration of most of humanity. This deferral of representation points to a postmodern problematic in apocalyptic figuration, and for Mitchell’s work constitutes a lack at the center of representing the real, when that reality is its own annihilation. This essay considers how Mitchell’s more recent works’ development have retroactively extended, transformed, and undermined the significance of the earlier works’ figurations of postmodern apocalypses. The Bone Clocks (2014), Sunken Garden (2013), and From Me Flows What You Call Time (2016/2114) collapse the postmodern indeterminate eschatologies that Mitchell had established in the early works, like a literary quantum superposition collapse in the Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment. The argument demonstrates how Mitchell’s recent works have denied the individual autonomy of the universes in each narrative, thereby establishing a retroactive Mitchellverse—a shared world that undoes the postmodern indeterminacy of the unfigured apocalyptic moment in favor of an increasingly didactic political critique of apoliticism in the face of apocalyptic climate change.